OVERGROWTH

Solo exhibition at Contrast - Tokyo, Japan.

What can be called “capsule aesthetic” has been a staple of graphic and industrial design for over a decade now. Websites, apps UI, infographics, etc. feature soft yet crisp, regular geometries with perfectly rounded corners, and are paired with pastel colored, uniform gradient fills. This visual language has spread through SNS and other platforms, and have become part of purely visual media like CG art, graphic art, and even more traditional media like painting and sculpture. Visual competition over brand identity and recognizability forces designers and engineers to simplify, flatten, soften every visible bit of information.

Like a fungal infection that spreads pervasively throughout its substrate – but that only displays pretty blooming patterns on the surface, “capsule aesthetic” seeks to give simplicity and friendliness to our impossibly chaotic internet environment. It makes us forget how frighteningly overstimulating and randomly curated is the content that we consume, and how little control we actually have over most of the technology that overwhelms our attention through algorithms and AI. Ultimately, this visual language eases us into forgetting how virtual environments and invisible forces shape our everyday lives and influence our physical bodies.

Andrea Samory’s first solo exhibition “Overgrowth” explores how most systems of aggregation and emergence can look deceivingly beautiful and familiar - yet their inner workings and the true extent of their scale are impossible to fully comprehend or visualize. It highlights the human instinct to create systems whose prime directive, as seen in nature, is growth beyond ethics and morals. It also takes inspiration from how virality (both as a biology-related concept and an internet-related concept) shape our society. Shiny, multiple, perfect abstract shapes overwhelm and engulf the landscapes of biomorphic patterns present in the exhibition’s sculptures and video projections. As in the body-horror movies Akira (1988) and Videodrome (1983), the concept of overgrowth is evoked as the continuous struggle between creation and entropy - both at the microscopic scale and at the cosmic scale, both in the physical world and in the virtual world.