The Garden of Emoji Delights, 2014
Digital C-print and video
The current speed of technological advancements suggests that biological organisms and the environment are irrevocably changing. In light of this, it is fascinating to discover how easily the visual vernacular of our day aligns with the symbology of a prescient artist from 500 years ago. The Garden of Earthly Delights, Bosch’s most ambitious work, embodies the conflicts, humor, darkness and absurdity of human, earthly and cosmological conditions.c
In The Garden of Emoji Delights, Carla Gannis creates a mash between popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and expands the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system, which offer shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations. Translating iconography of an earlier era by using Emoji seems to makes perfect “nonsense sense” to her.
The artist produced both a 2D print and moving image version of the “emojified garden”. The static work is a direct homage to Bosch — deeply tied in scale and physicality to the original. The moving image version allowed Gannis to be more dynamic with a hybrid visual vocabulary.
Courtesy: Carla Gannis & TRANSFER Gallery
