And/Or Gallery is pleased to present Show #30: Kristin Lucas.

For Show #30, Lucas will create an immersive, mediated environment of electronic and computational works that express her intense fascination with flamingos and her deep concerns about climate change.

With their pink feathers, serpentine necks, and wonky stilted legs, flamingos have long won over humans with their odd, exotic grace, achieving a mythical status in both our culture and kitsch. Yet despite the flamingo's symbolic status, the species and its wetland habitats are continually threatened by human activity. Representations of flamingos far outnumber their physical presence in the wild, but if one were to google "flamingo extinction," the search results would include news of their impending endangerment alongside post-industrial obits for the factory where the iconic plastic lawn ornaments were first produced. Under our polluted reality, the fate of the flamingo as tchotchke is on equal footing with the flamingo as being. In the range of works presented in Show #30, Lucas draws on her extensive research with flamingo experts and conservationists to shift this traditionally human-centered worldview in favor of a more ethical interspecies kinship. To that effect, technology is used for both its power to dehumanize and its capacity to connect. Viewers will be invited to embody and interface with these birds of paradise, but the media enabling these rare encounters—augmented reality, laser, neon, and other moving image technologies—will be as unstable and ethereal as the flamingo's future. Some of this work recently premiered at the Endgadget Experience: Alternative Realities event in Los Angeles, which awarded Lucas a grant to produce a mixed reality flamingo experience.

Also on view will be video works from Lucas' Sole Soaker and Sick Waves series, both of which capture the unease and turmoil created by rising sea levels. By using moving images and video game play to induce nausea and disorientation, Lucas' works impel the viewer to feel the physical illness of the Earth and the widespread upheavals climate change has already created.

Kristin Lucas (b. 1968, Iowa) is an artist who works across media and reality. Her work is in the collections of major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Dia Center for the Arts, and she has performed and exhibited at the MoMA, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, and the Center for Art and Media, among elsewhere. Lucas holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from Cooper Union, and she is represented by Postmasters Gallery and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in New York and And/Or Gallery in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of numerous residencies and grants, including ones from: Endgadget, Eyebeam, Harvard University, Harvestworks, MoMA PS1, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and Rhizome, among others. She currently lives between Queens, NY and Austin, TX, where she is on the faculty at the University of Texas.

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