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29 april 2024, Flor Linckens

Wanderlust: Lindsey Carr in KochxBos Gallery

Lindsey Carr, Log 01, 2024, KochxBos Gallery

From 4 to 11 May, the final part of the exhibition 'Wanderlust' will be on display at KochxBos Gallery in Amsterdam. In this exhibition, Lindsey Carr invites us on a journey into an alternative reality. During the opening in April, she remarked, "If I weren't an artist, I would probably be a science fiction writer." And that speaks volumes about her worldview. The Scottish artist introduces herself as a painter slash programmer, a combination that is clearly reflected in her practice.

Lindsey Carr is profoundly curious. For instance, some of her latest work are influenced by a fascination with fungi. During an alcohol-fueled evening, she found herself engaged in an animated conversation with a Ph.D. mycologist, a 'fungus expert'. That moment sparked an exploration into intricate and elaborate fungal networks. She even purchased a 'route-finding fungus' (mycorrhizal fungus) once. These intelligent fungal species create intricate networks that continue to astound scientists to this day. They can navigate through (man-made) mazes and in Japan, they are utilised in experiments to investigate the optimisation of subway networks.

Lindsey Carr, Milk, 2024, KochxBos Gallery

The exhibition at KochxBos comprises a series of oil paintings and a collection of watercolours. In these works, Lindsey Carr transports us into a fictional and futuristic world in which women scientists discover new life forms on distant planets. How could the female gaze take shape in this universe? The accompanying watercolours reference illustrations that ring familiar: we know them from the works of 18th and 19th-century scientists such as Linnaeus and Darwin. Like their historical counterparts, these fictional species are isolated from their original context and are seemingly floating on the white page. Her paintings and watercolours offer imaginative landscapes and species that nevertheless find a grounding in our present reality.

Because these forms draw their inspiration from a surprising source: machine learning. Carr has been active as a computer programmer for years, analysing complex data and using self-developed systems, trained with thousands of images and custom-written code. Her aim is to attain something complex. But recent advancements in A.I. — including the text-to-image function — have, according to the artist, imbued the term Artificial Intelligence with a loaded meaning: as if it were merely a matter of pressing a button, which is certainly not the case here.

The use of machine learning does allow for a certain degree of chance in the artist's practice, in which she relinquishes a measure of control, particularly in terms of composition and use of colour.

Lindsey Carr, Night Bloom, 2024, KochxBos Gallery

For her practice, Carr draws inspiration from various aspects of art history, such as naturalism, surrealism, Chinese and Japanese prints and 17th-century still lifes. Additionally, she utilises sources from natural history, both Western and non-Western, which she then reinterprets in her own unique way. In addition to paintings and works on paper, the artist also creates video installations, textile works and more.

The exhibition 'Wanderlust' by Lindsey Carr will once again be on display at KochxBos Gallery in Amsterdam from 4-11 May 2024.

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Flor Linckens

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29 april 2024, Flor Linckens

Wanderlust: Lindsey Carr in KochxBos Gallery

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