I would like to be midnight / I would like to be Sky

Columbus Museum of Art

Located in Upper Level Atrium, Mary and Bob Kidder Video Space
 
On view now through February 26, 2024

Admission Information

I would like to be midnight / I would like to be Sky is included with the cost of general admission.

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Exhibition Description

The horizon and an expansive sky are the only constants throughout I would like to be midnight / I would like to be sky. Since the beginning of time, humans have projected visions of our past and future upon the infinite, borderless expanse of the sky. Unlike the built and human-altered world on the ground, the stars appear unchanging; but increasingly, the sky is occupied and altered by thousands of satellites circling the Earth, while light pollution obscures and interferes with our view of the stars.

In the video, saturated photographs of landscapes swirl, drip, bubble, and morph into every environment from epic canyonlands to expansive evergreen mountainsides. Amelia Winger-Bearskin uses Artificial Intelligence to transform and alter still images she took while driving across the United States. Algorithmically driven tools, which are typically used to reconstruct and fill in missing regions of an image, help the artist erase traces of humans from the vistas. In the guise of twisting rainbows and fractals of colored light, the sky appears to dissolve houses and industrial farms into shimmering mirages, reasserting its power and presence.

Like Sarah Rosalena’s work, now on view at The Pizzuti in Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions, Winger-Bearskin uses advanced technology to explore the relationships between earth and sky in Indigenous cosmologies.

About the Artist

Amelia Winger-Bearskin (MFA, University of Texas) is an artist who empowers people to leverage bleeding edge technology to effect positive change in the world. She is an Innovation Fellow at the Land Acknowledgement Lab for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture: Honor Native Land Initiative. She founded the project Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his world headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur/Sundance Institute fellowship for her 360 video immersive installation in collaboration with the artist Wendy Red Star (supported by the Google JUMP Creator program). In 2018 she also was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project from Engadget and Verizon Media. Winger-Bearskin is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

 

Amelia Winger-Bearskin, American, Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma born 1979, I would like to be midnight / I would like to be Sky, 2023. Digital Video, digital interpolation, landscape photography, and sound, 10:27. Courtesy of the artist