OPENING RECEPTION 

Wednesday, November 6
InterAccess, 7 – 9PM

CURATOR WALKTHROUGH & CONVERSATION

Saturday, November 16
InterAccess, 2 – 3:30PM 

GALLERY HOURS

November 6 – December 7
Tuesday – Saturday, 11 – 6PM

InterAccess is pleased to present the 23rd Annual IA Current Exhibition, DINNER AT THE AUTOMAT. 

Curated by Casper Sutton-Fosman and featuring the work of artists Lena Chen, Jenson Leonard, Alfred Muszynski, Sam Pelletier, and Shay Salehi, DINNER AT THE AUTOMAT explores the promises and failures of automation and artificial intelligence. Centering the obfuscated human labor that is vital to our experience of a high-tech, automatic world, the exhibition makes visible what is often hidden, lurking beneath the surface of techno-hype.

Working in video, kinetic sculpture, multimedia painting, ready-mades and audio installation, the featured artists build a conversation around the nuances of hidden labor. The selected works illuminate the violence and absurdity of treating human bodies as machines, question the value of automating creativity, and complicate our understanding of whose labor is valued and made visible.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Casper Sutton-Fosman is a cross-disciplinary artist, curator and academic currently based in Toronto, ON. Their work centres conceptions of identity through a trans and disabled lens, pushing boundaries of medium and discipline to open in-between spaces for being. Sutton-Fosman is interested in troubling linearity and authorship, interactivity and implication, working in spaces between analogue and digital, involving craft practices and outdated technology. They hold an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design from OCAD University and a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Lena Chen

Lena Chen is a Chinese American multidisciplinary artist working across performance, social practice, moving image, and new media. Exploring intimacy, labor, and gender, her practice provides a feminist perspective on technology and care. A recipient of awards from Mozilla Foundation and Sundance Institute, her work has appeared at Transmediale (Berlin), Sheffield DocFest, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Färgfabriken (Stockholm), Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival, and Science Gallery Detroit. Her work is in the collections of the Center for Art + Environment at Nevada Museum of Art and MUST Museo del territorio in Vimercate, Italy. Currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she holds a BA in sociology from Harvard University and a MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University. She is based in Los Angeles, California.

Jenson Leonard 

Drawn to ideas of flight, escape, and poetic blur, Jenson Leonard’s practice attempts respite from the coercive modes that shape the modern subject, its totalizing forms of legibility. The networked economy of memetic imagery motivates his work. Being extremely online and knowing that memes exist in a site of collapsed context, he strives to make work that typifies this slippage, often critiquing technocapitalist excess, while at the same time, pointing out its attraction. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute, and has completed residencies at Obracadobra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY) and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). His work has been featured in VICE Motherboard, Juxtapoz, AQNB, and Rhizome.

Alfred Muszynski 

Alfred Muszynski is a visual and digital artist based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. He holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University and an AEC in Virtual Reality from Institut Grasset. His work was featured on multiple occasions by the platform Do Not Research and most recently showcased as part of a solo show at the Centre Culturel Georges Vanier (Montreal, QC). His artistic practice can be defined as a hybridization between painting, collage and digital art. Rooted in an eclecticism of mediums and styles artistic, his practice seeks to replicate the content agglomeration, style dissonance and memetics at the heart of internet aesthetics and vernacular. His paintings are primarily done using oil but frequently include printed images, drawing, LED screens, smart phones, and 3D elements, such as laser-engraved acrylic or paintings on concrete. Found images, screenshots or AI generated content populate his compositions, challenging preconceived notions of copyright and ownership in the field of painting.

Sam Pelletier

Sam Pelletier’s work consists of interactive installations that use robotics, automation, special effects and performance to encourage scientific skeptical reflection in viewers and participants. His background as an arcade technician and mechanic has made him deeply cynical about utopian technological futures, ambivalent about the role of fantasy in everyday life, and he is viscerally aware of human fallibility. His practice draws on film, surrealism, interactive museum exhibits, internet culture, and fun-fair attractions to create strange and ambivalent encounters. Pelletier uses play and humour to help make the viewer more comfortable engaging with upsetting and alienating themes.

Shay Salehi

Shay Salehi is an interdisciplinary New York based artist exploring the complexities of human to nonhuman relationships. Anchored through entangled empathy, Salehi investigates the framework that enforces human superiority and the ownership and capitalization of non-human animal bodies. Her practice is a visual metaphor that analyzes outdated habits and challenges normative societal structures. Through this work, she provides the audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as dominance, domestication and the space to decipher our ethical standards. In 2020, Shay received a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCADU) in Sculpture and Installation. Previously, Shay studied glasswork at Sheridan College (2011-2014) and continues to make sculptural glasswork. In 2023, she completed an MFA in Fine Art at The New School in Manhattan, New York.

ABOUT IA CURRENT

The InterAccess Current (IA Current) program supports the professional development of emerging curators and artists interested in new media and electronic practices. Each year, InterAccess selects an emerging curator, who works closely with InterAccess staff to conceptualize and execute an exhibition of works by emerging artists. “Current” refers to the now, of course, but it is also an energetic charge that causes light, heat, and all manner of electronic life; an apt metaphor for emergent creative practices within the ever-expanding field of new media. 

Image courtesy of Sam Pelletier.