Exhibits & Events

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Martin’s End, an exhibition of work by Ryan Scails and Andre Yvon that ponders image-making in the wake of the 2016 election and growth of generative artificial intelligence.

Working with opacity, structure, and density, Scails and Yvon critique the primacy of technological frames in the perception and construction of engineered things. Elements of control and hyper-reality meet in the multi-layered airbrush paintings of Yvon and Scails’s rendered drawings and fiber-based sculptures. Yvon elaborates their deconstructive manual technique within a range of source images, such as lawn grass, spiderwebs, an orchid, and a mugshot of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who served a prison sentence for leaking an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Engaging the act of looking through exacting renderings of speculative technical objects and “anti-exposure units,” Scails’s modular soft sculptures resist institutional imposition at their seams. His dye bath carriers invite the viewer to consider life in a world without industrially-manufactured colors, a ready-to-hand proposal for a provisional, survivable future, beyond images. The work of both artists opens discussion around what 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger deemed “the end of philosophy” - namely, the cybernetic quality of research that measures, analyzes, and modifies the physical and social world. What do images initiate? Where do they end?

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Curated by Curatorial Fellow Charlotte G. Chin Greene