EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES came to a close this past week, following a very successful run at Stanford Art Gallery. Curated by the non/phenomenal collective (Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson), and featuring 20 artists and collaboratives, the exhibition opened on January 22 and closed on March 13.
Photo: Shaun Roberts
The show was extremely well attended throughout the 7+ week duration, with visitors spending a good deal of time in the gallery. Despite the conceptual complexity of the show, visitors from a wide variety of backgrounds reported that they found it engaging and accessible.
Photo: Shaun Roberts
Last week, there was a nice review of the show by Audrey Chang in the Stanford Daily:
And before that, there was a write-up by Olivia Peterkin for Stanford Arts:
EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES may be over, but the non/phenomenal collective has a lot more in store, so stay tuned!
We’re coming up on the final week of EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, with 20 amazing artists and collaboratives approaching the conditions of appearance and nonappearance from a wide variety of angles and mediums. The exhibition, curated by the non/phenomenal collective (Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson) is open Monday through Friday, 12-5pm, through March 13.
The video above, featuring drone footage shot by Shaun Roberts and edited by Shane Denson, provides an overview (literally) of the show.
EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES opened last Thursday, January 22, and will be up until March 13, 2026 at the Stanford Art Gallery. Here are some impressions, along with my remarks, from the opening (courtesy of Anja Ulfeldt).
EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES January 22–March 13, 2026 Stanford Art Gallery
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 22, 5-7pm
What are the limits of experience? This exhibition explores forms of appearance that press against the edges of perception—phenomena that are felt only indirectly, sensed as traces, intensities, or disturbances rather than as stable objects. “Extra/phenomenality” refers to this ambiguous zone of surplus and slippage: where aspects of the world exceed or elude our usual modes of noticing, while still shaping how we see, feel, and understand.
Such excess takes many forms. It can be found in natural processes whose scales outrun human attention; in cultural and spiritual traditions that treat appearance as layered or illusory; in psychological or bodily states that strain the coherence of conscious experience. It also takes shape in today’s technical environments—where images, signals, and decisions circulate through systems that operate faster than we can perceive. New modes of appearance are at stake, but also new zones of non-appearance—gaps, blind spots, and operations that remain perceptually inaccessible. In all of these cases, the limits of experience are stretched and reconfigured.
The artists gathered here engage this terrain of extension and attenuation. Some work with subtle shifts of color, rhythm, or material to draw attention to thresholds where perception begins to blur. Others stage encounters with forms that flicker between visibility and invisibility, inviting viewers to sense what hovers at experience’s margins. Still others explore how contemporary computational systems generate patterns that enter our lives without ever presenting themselves directly.
Taken together, the works invite reflection on how the phenomenal world is never given all at once, but is continually inflected by forces that lie just beyond phenomenality itself. EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES asks viewers to slow down, to look again, and to inhabit the unstable relation between what appears and what exceeds appearing—an aesthetic space where the subtle, the oblique, and the barely perceptible can take on new significance.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Morehshin Allahyari, Mark Amerika, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder, Brett Amory, Rebecca Baron + Douglas Goodwin, Jon Bernson, Daniel Brickman, Paul DeMarinis, Karin + Shane Denson, Ebti, Frank Floyd, Gabriel Harrison, DJ Meisner, Joshua Moreno, Carlo Nasisse, Miguel Novelo, Andy Rappaport, William Tremblay, Camille Utterback, and Kristen Wong
CURATED BY: Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson
VISITOR INFORMATION: Stanford Art Gallery is located at 419 Lasuen Mall, off Palm Drive. The gallery is open Monday–Friday, 12–5pm (except on opening day, Jan. 22), and will be closed Presidents’ Day (Monday, Feb. 16). Visitor parking is available in designated areas and payment is managed through ParkMobile (free after 4pm, except by the Oval). Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. This exhibition is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.
I’m excited to announce that GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimals! — BOVINE, part of a larger series of collaborations between me and Karin Denson, will be installed at GearBox Gallery in Oakland. The opening is Saturday, November 1 (1-4pm), and it will be on view through December 6 (with a closing event and artist talk starting at 2pm).
The installation comprises a set of paintings and custom software that runs a real-time generative audiovisual experience. You can read more about the piece here and here.
And here are a couple of installation shots from a recent show at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley:
We had an awesome opening for Phase 1 of Non/phenomenalities at 120710 Gallery this past Saturday. Looking forward to the Phase 2 opening on August 16!!!
NON/PHENOMENALITIES — a show that I am co-curating with artist Brett Amory at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley — opens July 26 with an amazing lineup of artists.
The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand, phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses; this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to sensation).
Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.
As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its “discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/ phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial epiphenomenon?
Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,” maybe even the boring.
Beyond the Screen is an exhibition of desktop videos made by students in my Fall 2023 course on “The Video Essay.” The show, featuring three collaboratively made videos, is up from January 22-February 2, 2024 in the McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.
Featured are:
Escape, by Karla Aguilar, Eric Wang, and Roisin Willis (14:52)
Pixilated Mimicry, by Lauren Boles and Michael Hemker (15:10)
Crypto Crisis, by Sheryl Hsu and Nathaniel Begay (12:40)
On display from January 6 to January 27, 2022 in Stanford’s McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) is SCREENTIME: An Exhibition of Desktop Videos.
The exhibition grows out of a collaboration between Stanford and Occidental College — between Shane Denson’s class “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Media and Culture” and Allison de Fren’s “The Video Essay,” both of which were taught in Fall 2021.
Students in each class met online and worked through some of the more troubling aspects of online life, including online racism, radicalization, pornography, and politics. The resulting videos, all of which use the computer desktop as both a topic and a medium, reflect the troubled times of contemporary screentime, and the sonic cacophony in the exhibition space challenges viewers to come to terms with the ways that screens today compete for our attention.
Included in the exhibition are eleven remarkable videos:
I Love Kanye (2021) — D’Andre Jorge (sophomore, Stanford)
A Letter to My Younger Self, on the Dangers of the Internet (2021) — David Kolifrath (freshman, Occidental)
The Commercialization of Self Image (2021) — Ashton Berg (sophomore, Stanford)
I am happy to announce Amalgamate, an exhibition of videos made by students in my course on “The Video Essay” (Fall 2019). Works range from analytical to experimental, with activist impulses and cinephilic sensitivities sprinkled throughout. The show runs from January 10-31, 2020 in the Gunn Foyer, McMurtry Building, at Stanford.
