Carla Gannis is an artist who works across digital media and painting. Brought up in North Carolina, Gannis lives in Brooklyn, New York, US. She studied at the University of North Carolina before receiving an MFA from Boston University. She is faculty and the assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute, New York. Upon her arrival to New York in the late 1990s, she began incorporating digital elements into her painting-based practice. Since then she has eclectically explored the domains of “Internet Gothic” cutting and pasting from the threads of networked communication, googleable art history, and speculative fiction to produce dark and often humorous explorations of the human condition. Her practice of collage and remix illuminates the potentialities of democratization and alienation in technology. In her work, she invites viewers to experience inescapably mediated contemporary life “through a digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency, emerge.
Since 2003, Gannis’s work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include: A Subject Self-Defined, TRANSFER Gallery, New York, US, 2016; and The Garden of Earthly Delights, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT and The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, 2015. Group exhibitions include: Porn to Pizza - Domestic Cliches at DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2015; and Beautiful Interfaces, Reverse Gallery, New York, 2014. Her work has been featured in press and publications including, The Creators Project, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The LA Times, amongst others. She has participated on numerous panels regarding intersections in art and technology including Let’s Get Digital, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014; and Cogency in the Imaginarium at Cooper Union and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014. In 2015, her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press. Her augmented reality artist book The Selfie Drawings was awarded the Founder's Award from the 2016 Lumen Prize.
