WAITING FOR THE BIG ONE

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Lee Wells' work invokes liminal situations – dream, illusion, simulation - that test the boundaries of human perception and deepen reality’s foundations.

Waiting for the Big One propels visitors into an immersive narrative where the whimsical meets the apocalyptic. The exhibition features, the End of the World Party Series, an ultra-contemporary representation of twenty-first-century deities hosting lavish pool parties in Los Angeles. Characters such as 'Ruby Ray,' 'Striped Sebastian,' 'Azure Alana,' and 'Goldie Grace' are captured in moments of defiance against destiny, their laughter and leisure casting a stark contrast to the looming end. These artworks, bridging new forms of painting and photography, encapsulate the ephemeral beauty of existence, urging viewers to revel in the moment.

The genesis of this captivating series traces back to Wells’ long standing focus on various systems of power and control. Since the early 1990's Wells has stood at the frontier of digital and traditional art, and most recently he is integrating artificial intelligence with classical painting techniques, photography, and video to create a new visual language. His work prompts us to rethink art, reality, and human creativity's potential amidst the technological progression of AI technology.

In 2019, Wells presented Dolphins vs Robots at the AC Institute, a immersive performance featuring custom made VideoArtBots, created by repurposing consumer electronics into AI beings. Previously, in 2018, he exhibited Sophia's Safehouse in an Uncanny Valley at Darling Pearls & Co in London. The artworks examined the recent celebrity culture around humanoid AI and robotics. The artist used the installation to explore 21st-century concepts of humanity, authenticity, and identity, drawing on the influences of Orwell, Shelley, Dick, and Asimov.

A Reinforced Type of Reality

However, little attention has been paid to the fact that it was precisely this kind of juxtaposition between the real and the imaginary, the reality and the dream, that made possible the approach of a reinforced type of reality, a surreality. 

New Reality Principal 

Wells' series employ AI as a data processing system that simulates reality, thus threatening the distinction between true and false, the real and the imaginary. It renders the boundaries of human perception obscure and it disrupts the reality principle, as defined by Jean Baudrillard.

Realise the Truth

This complex nexus of relations become even more perplexed when it comes to art, because art is not a reality, but ‘a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand’ according to Pablo Picasso. The relations between the imaginary and the real, to which the juxtaposition between art and reality belongs, are examined as a kind of critical exercise at the limits of the deceptive operations of perception. Sensuality and Power Searching for the elements of sensuality and power, Wells's series experiments with situations that perturb the discrimination between the real and the imaginary, such as illusion, madness, etc. This exercise to the limits of the deceptive functions of perception leads to the renegotiation of a form of reality that is revolutionary on multiple levels, especially regarding the relationship between art and life.

Deceptive Operations of Perception

Wells series evoke an innovative way the critical examination of the deceptive operations of perception as visualized in Max Ernst’s 1920's forest paintings and produce powerful sensual and emotional experiences that reach the sublime and evoked in Wells interior gardens.

The Uncanny Valley

The series examines the uncanny in relation to the functions of perception in post-AI art. The experience of viewing an AI assisted image tends to intrigue a sense of anxiety. This anxiety,

that includes the alienation from something that used to be known and familiar, could be described as uncanny. We can accept that this ‘is in reality' according to Sigmund Freud 'nothing new or foreign, but something familiar—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression’.

perception/deception

Despite the contemporary tendency to objectify and eroticize the female body these images raise a crucial question since it is never clear who is deceiving whom. The author the artificial intelligence or vice versa? Adding the beholders to those involved in the process of perception/ deception addresses questions of perception, deception, simulation and, therefore, the representation itself as this new form of surrealism brings back to light.

Truths Are Illusions

According to Nietzsche, "truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses’. Considering the above, truths are anthropogenic inventions and man an artificially creating subject. However, man has forgotten both the deceptive nature of truth as well as himself as the subject of this process. Only by this process of oblivion, of repression, the human can live in a certain peace, security and consistency.

Simulation and Real Sympathy

Surrealists’ enterprise to augment reality is assisted one hundred years later by the discovery of artificial intelligence, which similarly to the unconscious mind provides the ‘human researcher’ with the opportunity, as André Breton mentioned, to ‘carry his investigations much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities’.