seeing-eye engine

August 1st - September 4th

Opening reception: August 1st, 6 pm - 9 pm

Featuring: Parker Conrad and Guy Grabowsky

Curated by: Milly Cai

Frisson Gallery presents seeing-eye engine, a two-person exhibition featuring Parker Conrad and Guy Grabowsky, marking the artists’ first exhibition at the gallery. Though working in ostensibly distinct mediums, Conrad in painting and Grabowsky in photography, both artists share a preoccupation with the image as a constructed, unstable object rather than a transparent window onto the world. 

Grabowsky’s works, built through a hybrid of analogue and digital processes including darkroom, Xerox, and flatbed scanner, aim to rupture the moment of eye-camera-lens-subject encounter by exposing the mechanics and materiality of the photographic image itself. Conrad arrives at a parallel rupture from the opposite direction, sourcing imagery from personal photographs, online archives, and text-to-image generation; they use composite digital blueprints as a scaffold for paintings that render speculative, almost-familiar anatomies like bodies caught between the organic and the mechanical, the unmediated and the synthetic. 

Placed together, the two bodies of work suggest that photography and painting, however divergent their tools, are converging on the same set of questions: what happens to an image and to the body or subject it purports to depict once it has passed through multiple layers of technological apparatus? In an image-saturated visual culture where the line between captured and generated, analogue and algorithmic, continues to blur, Parker Conrad and Guy Grabowsky each stage a version of the image on the verge of dissolving into its own process. seeing-eye engine invites viewers to consider not just what these images show, but what they reveal about how images are produced and reproduced today.