New Typologies: David Hartt, James Hoff and Kahlil Robert Irving

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Oct. 21-Dec. 15, 2022

Opening Reception: Oct. 21, 5-7:30pm
Art Alliance

The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is pleased to present New Typologies, a three-person exhibition by David Hartt, James Hoff and Kahlil Robert Irving that presents innovative investigations of landscape tropes while providing commentary on today’s complex issues. These are works comprised of allusive signs and geolocations, delineating societal stances that illuminate while they critique.

David Hartt’s work unpacks cultural and economic complexities, exploring how historic ideologies persist or transform over time. In his film Et in Arcadia Ego, shot on location at modernist architect Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, Hartt uses its pastoral setting to unpack Johnson’s complicated history with fascism. This version of an idyllic “Arcadia” is inhabited only by Olimpia, played by Tomeka Reid, the composer of the score, who is guarded by a blind Black giant, Orion. By centering bodies outside of the dominant narrative, Hartt’s use of archetypes forges a new and uniquely compelling alternative.

James Hoff's practice encompasses multidisciplinary painting, sound, and performance which uses manipulated digital information to produce hybrid forms. His abstract paintings derive from distortions of data through a computer virus, which resemble lyrical abstraction. In other series, landscape images are etched into a copper and fiberglass laminate following the procedure of circuit board production. A considerably more dystopic version of landscape is represented by Hoff’s and his collaborator DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s video HOBO UFO (v. The New World). Compiled through internet searches and archival footage (such as the police brutality in Birmingham), it testifies to a sobering and frightening vision of a collapsing state. Via video field recordings and detourned commercial mapping software, HOBO UFO presents a graphic glimpse of American race relations to devastating effect. By using crowd sourced protests and the UFO as a metaphorical vehicle for traversing geopolitical trouble zones through Google’s Street View (locating the 114 killings of black people since the pandemic’s start, information now tragically outdated), along with Brown, Jr.’s mechanized techno jazz percussive score, the pair produce a sobering document.

Kahlil Robert Irving creates objects and environments mixing ceramic sculptures and digital fact gathering. Initially the ceramics were emblazoned with decals mimicking urban refuse. Later, those works were surrounded by environments of site-specific wallpaper. In contrast to the ceramic debris, these scrolls of digital culture are mined from Image archives of Black lives, remembrance and celebration, creating an experience like navigating AI or CGI-built city environments or physical and metaphysical spaces coexisting simultaneously. Speckled jacquard weavings juxtaposed with images of the sky, take on the vastness of the cosmos while retaining their earthly references. As Irving states “I’m interested in the capacity of a material to tell contemporary, secular, and political narratives, especially with a material that exists in such a broad, architecturally based engagement, but that can also be used to make art.”

All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.

Digital film still showing a glass house and person wearing a gold helmet sitting on a couch

Image of artwork made with collaged images and words from google searches

artwork showing bare black trees in a group against a light pink background

Left: (top) David Hartt, Et in Arcardia Ego, 2022, digital film. Courtesy the artist and David Nolan Gallery, New York; (bottom):Kahlil Robert Irving, Means_Angles_Integers (The weight of media) #8, 2021, vinyl, aluminum, 20 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Right: James Hoff, Useless Landscape 53, 2017, Copper Etching on Fiberglass, Aluminum, Wood, Lacquer. Courtesy the artist.