Kevin Esherick’s solo
The Artist Is Absent now open

View the show at 300 Broome in NYC’s Lower East Side from Feb 11 to Mar 14, and on our website.

Thank you to all who joined us
for the opening last week!

Last Wednesday, February 11, we opened Kevin Esherick’s solo show, titled The Artist is Absent. In a letter dated July 23rd, 2024, Kevin first announced his intention to train LLMs on his own writing and art until they could credibly create new works in his style and replace his conceptual practice. He would then hand over all art marking to this AI for one year. That year began on Wednesday night.

This show, the last of Kevin’s human-conceived art-making for the coming year, exhibits two new bodies of work, Ablation Studies and Homages. The opening night also featured a special Homage performance re-enacting Marina Abramavić’s ‘The Artist is Present’ where attendees had the opportunity to sit with the actress throughout the three hour event.

The exhibition of Ablation Studies and Homages is a deep exploration into how technology stands to reshape the roles of authorship and authenticity in our society, both in art-making and beyond.

Ablation Studies

In machine learning, an ablation study is a way of examining what happens when parts of a system are removed, eroded, or destroyed by their human experimenters. Ablation Studies turns this logic on its head, examining how systems of human meaning and relations degrade under the proliferation of artificial intelligence, how their subjects push back, and what new beauty might emerge from the dialectic.

Homages

The other body of work, titled Homages, complicates the notion of homage with a collection of new works made using AI models that have been trained on some of Esherick’s favorite contemporary artists. Where Sturtevant used replication to explore the proliferation of images and the idea of the simulacrum, and Levine re-photographed canonical images to challenge constructs of authorship, Esherick is now working with today’s tools to imagine the inevitable consequences on artistry of AI.

“The Artist Is Absent” is on view in the gallery
Feb 11 - Mar 14