For VOLTA 10, Amy Schissel has created Animate Grounds, an installation displayed as an electronic skin, depicting the evolution of an optic, pictorial space into an emergent, contextual environment. She reconfigures painting/drawing into an associational matrix—emphasizing a culturally-coded zone of focus, with painterly features suggesting themselves as interfaces between our physical geography and virtual presence. The work asserts a bodily awareness to the invisible intersections and networks penetrating our environment. It explores a hybrid relationship between the languages of painting and digitization by subscribing to digital architecture, interaction design, and mapping processes, with the aim of reappraising the traditional language of abstract painting.
Amy Schissel’s professional practice analyzes the role of painting/drawing in the Information Age. It responds to a technological presence in a data-driven, media-saturated culture, and examines the contradictions of identity in geo-political relationships: how being surrounded by media shapes our understanding of personal and collective history, engendered by digitization. Schissel addresses the progressively dematerialized quality of digital society by visualizing and mapping information flows that cut through time and space, seemingly negating the need of geographical location for human interaction. She reinvents our contemporary landscape, fostering a sense of civic legibility where the World Wide Web calls us to be everywhere yet nowhere at once.
VOLTA is Basel's renowned platform for presenting the vision of contemporary art galleries of global prestige whose artists represent new and relevant positions for curators and collectors alike. Conceived to bridge a gap between Basel's pre-existing fairs, VOLTA showcases galleries – whether young or mature – that choose to work with the most exciting emerging artists. These galleries must keep deeply meaningful connections with their artists and follow them throughout their careers. In turn, select galleries exhibit in the airy rotunda surroundings of Basel's Markthalle, elevating their own platforms for an experience mutually beneficial to fair visitors and the galleries alike.