I'll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen

Surveying some 50 years of groundbreaking art related to digital technology and the screen, I’ll Be Your Mirror examines how technologies such as home computers, smartphones and TV have affected art and life over the past five decades. It traces a trajectory stretching back to the late 1960s, a watershed moment in the rise of the screen in the home. Today, accelerated by the pandemic, our daily life is mediated through screens for work, entertainment and sociality.

Artists include: Lillian Schwartz, Nam June Paik, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Andy Warhol, Gretchen Bender, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jacqueline Humphries, Cory Arcangel, Petra Cortright, Elias Sime, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, Rick Silva, Wickerham & Lomax, Avery Singer, American Artist, Simon Denny, Skawennati, Jacolby Satterwhite, Carson Lynn, Ed Atkins, Arthur Jafa, Cao Fei and Frances Stark.

Edited with text by Alison Hearst. Foreword by Marla Price. Text by John Suler, Omar Kholeif, Tina Rivers Ryan.

Paperback, 8 x 10.5 in. / 224 pgs / 91 color.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen

February 12, 2023 - April 30, 2023

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents the landmark I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, a thematic group exhibition that examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. This exhibition surveys more than sixty works by fifty artists over the past five decades. The artists included examine screen culture through a broad range of media such as paintings, sculpture, video games, digital art, augmented reality, and video.

Screens affect nearly every aspect of life today. Their pervasiveness has bred a 24/7 breaking news cycle, the looming corporate-sponsored virtual-reality “Metaverse,” unlimited accessibility and content, and an ease in how ideas and images are distributed, undoubtedly shaping culture in profound ways. This exhibition starts in 1969—the year of the televised Apollo moon landing and the launch of the internet’s prototype, ARPANET—as this was the watershed year where collective connectivity through screens was first mobilized in mainstream culture. This era forged what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently deemed in the 1960s a “global village,” a place where distance is collapsed and people from across the world readily interact. Following this trajectory, contemporary life is hybrid and increasingly mediated through screens. These flat and finite surfaces embody more than what meets the eye—they hold up a mirror to society and contribute to forming meaning in life and mainstream culture.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen is organized into nine key themes: liminal space, connectivity, surveillance, the repository, digital abstraction, the posthuman body, automation and the loneliness epidemic, ecology, and turning a mirror on ourselves.

More than 25,000 square feet of gallery space will be devoted to the exhibition, which will include iconic works by prominent national and international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Arthur Jafa, Nam June Paik, Hito Steyerl, and Andy Warhol, and as well as several leading artists living in Texas, including Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara. Several new and never-before-seen works by key artists Caitlin Cherry, Simon Denny, Kahlil Robert Irving, and Hasan Elahi will debut in this exhibition. This is the most in-depth show of its kind in the Southwest region and is only one of a few presentations exploring art and digital technology in the past decade at this scale. The exhibition is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and is curated by Curator Alison Hearst.

There will be an online platform for the exhibition.