Carla Gannis: Portraits in Landscape, at Midnight Moment Times Square
For three minutes daily, starting at 11:57PM, Times Square becomes one massive art installation. At the stroke of midnight, electronic billboards all around revert to the usual fare of banks and burgers, pop albums and fashion lines, but for 180 seconds commerce gives way to cutting edge art in a program run by Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. In recent years, the likes of Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle, Alex Prager and Pipilotti Rist have interrupted the flow of consumerist consciousness. This August, Carla Gannis has taken the spotlight—to use a hopelessly old-fashioned term for what includes multi-story, 8K retina displays. A traditionally trained painter who’s also a total geek (she administers the digital arts program at Pratt Institute) Gannis is probably best known for her redo, entirely in emojis, of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch. This time, she channels Giuseppe Arcimboldo, substituting the mannerist master’s fruits and vegetables with appropriately synthetic components for portraits of avatars taking their selfies amidst throngs of tourists below, many, of course, doing the same. DAVID COHEN
Photo: Yuliya Lanina