DOUG AITKEN - Open

venue: Maag Areal, Zurich

DOUG AITKEN
Open
February 15 – March 26, 2022

Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Zurich), 303 Gallery (New York), Regen Projects (Los Angeles), and Victoria Miro (London) are pleased to announce a joint presentation of the new virtual reality exhibition by Doug Aitken, Open, exclusively on Vortic. This innovative exhibition by the artist will be available to view at all four galleries’ physical spaces, where Oculus headsets will show Vortic VR, Vortic’s new virtual reality platform. Open is also now available to view on Vortic’s web and mobile app.

In Open, the first project to launch on Vortic VR, Aitken has created what he sees as a new context for his artworks, both realized and speculative. Across four separate viewing rooms, viewers will encounter Aitken’s artworks installed in imaginary architectural environments that are themselves set within a hyperreal world that is at once familiar and fantastical. Hosted within the Oculus virtual reality system, Open can be adapted to a wide range of applications, from remote viewing experiences to the contemplation of as-yet-unrealized projects. In this current iteration, select works made by Aitken since 2019 are joined by realistic digital renderings of sculptures that build on his recent projects.

In previous interactive sculptures, Aitken has aimed to ‘break the screen.’ His mirrored, reactive sculptures are always evolving—whether biologically, in the case of Underwater Pavilions, 2016, which became crusted with aquatic life, or socially, as in Green Lens, 2021, which was activated by a series of happenings. Crucially, as Aitken says, all these sculptures are ‘unplugged.' For Open, Aitken has found ways to apply similar principles to the dematerialized, digital medium of virtual reality.