Memes of Consciousness
Dakota Gearhart
534 Gallery Window
Dakota Gearhart shares a selection of mixed media videos focused on the various ways Earth’s living beings might experience consciousness. Incorporating both fact and fiction, with elements of collage, performance, sound, text, and animation, Gearhart’s meme-inspired videos superimpose the “digital” and the “natural” into dreamscapes where access to the ineffable inner lives of animals (and humans) is universally accessible. In this way, she uses the form of video to express, and even illustrate, the imagined realities of crabs, alligators, humans, and other creatures. To Gearhart, the combination of anthropomorphic fiction with fact-based scientific research offers a meaningful way to visualize non-hierarchical multispecies relationships, particularly in our human-centric global moment, where climate change and species extinction are progressing at a rapid pace.
About the Artist
Dakota Gearhart is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her practice examines the environment and how it is perceived through technology. She is particularly invested in the radical deconstruction of contemporary power structures according to an ecofeminist worldview. Her work has been exhibited at The Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Queens Museum, NY; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, OR; Equity Gallery, NY; Horse Hospital, London; Horse and Pony Gallery, Berlin; Lab’Attoir, Thessaloniki, Greece; and Taiyuan University, Taiyuan, China. She has been awarded the BRIC Digital Media Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fellowship, and a National Endowments for the Arts US-Japan Creative Fellowship which will bring her work to Japan in 2022.
