Lucid Dreaming: Hallucinations and Alternate Realities from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation by Thoma Foundation

Lucid Dreaming

Hallucinations and Alternate Realities from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection

Lucid Dreaming

Hallucinations and Alternate Realities from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection

February 28–May 31, 2025

Art Vault, Santa Fe, New Mexico

This catalogue was produced in association with the exhibition Lucid Dreaming: Hallucinations and Alternate Realities from the Carl & Marlilynn Thoma Foundation Collection.

February 28–May 31, 2025 at Art Vault, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Kathleen Forde, Director and Curator, Media Arts

Kathleen Richards, Art Vault Exhibitions Manager

Meagan Robson, Collections Manager

Rachel Lewis, Collections Assistant

Sophie Ross, Graphic Designer

Madison Spencer, Communications Coordinator

Edited by Ruth Keffer and Madison Spencer

Acknowledgments

Lucid Dreaming marks an evolution of the Thoma Foundation exhibition program that paves the way for future Thoma exhibitions at Art Vault and beyond. Marilynn and I wish to express our appreciation to all who made this exhibition possible.

The Thoma Foundation’s growing curatorial and exhibition team is forging our position at the intersection of arts, technology, and education, leading to more Thoma-curated exhibitions, the continued expansion of our diverse collection, and a growing Museum Loan Program.

At the helm of this ambitious project is Kathleen Forde, Director and Curator of Media Arts, whose vision and leadership shaped this interdisciplinary project. Thank you to our dedicated collections and exhibition team, who brought this exhibition to life. Thank you to Kathleen Richards, Art Vault Exhibitions Manager; Meagan Robson, Collections Manager; and Rachel Lewis, Collections Assistant. Special thanks to our communications team— Madison Spencer, Communications Coordinator, for leading the production of this catalogue ; Sophie Ross, Graphic Designer; and Ruth Keffer, who provided sage editorial input on the text.

We are particularly grateful to the artists presented in this exhibition, whom we are proud and honored to have in the collection.

Carl Thoma, Founder and President

Lucid Dreaming: Hallucinations and Alternate Realities from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection

Throughout history, artists have consistently provoked viewers to look at their world through a different lens. They have inspired a consideration of the difference between how things appear to be and how they could exist in an alternate, future, or augmented version of reality.

Contemporary artists pursue the manifestation of this “glitch in the simulation” by using various digital tools, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, CGI, and the like. That said, one can go back as far as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to trace creative precedents. Dreams, illusions, and hallucinations intertwined with the tangible world have provided poetic and philosophical influence for a range of artistic genres from surrealism to dada, magical realism and beyond, that explore the possibility of transcending an inflexible reality.

Given the ever-shifting complexities of every generation, it is perhaps not surprising that artists continue to conjure a reimagination of reality. Drawn from the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection, Lucid Dreaming presents works by artists who provoke us to think about the world we live in, the ground we stand on, and to take another look at the physical and psychological world we previously thought of as fixed as something more flexible and capable of change.

Kathleen Forde, Director and Curator, Media Arts

Pointillisme #01 continues Quayola’s exploration of high-precision laser scanning systems and their inherited imperfections. In the video, multicolored pixels begin appearing and moving into tighter clusters towards the center, spreading across the entire image. With more and more detail, the scene recedes to position new compositional elements at the front. Eventually, the image slows into a fully realized and abstracted landscape.

Drawing a parallel between historical pictorial traditions and computational aesthetics, this project uses machines to generate speculative landscapes. While reproducing similar conditions to those favored by the “plein air” painters of the late nineteenth century, the landscapes, though they appear natural, are actually observed and analyzed through complex technological apparatuses. The collected data is repurposed through new visual formulas. The landscapes are synthetic, but perhaps no more so than those created by an artist’s hand.

QUAYOLA (b. 1982, Rome; lives and works in London) is a digital artist, painter, and sculptor who uses algorithms as his tool. Technology is a lens through which he explores the tensions between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines traditional imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture, and iconography are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s hybrid compositions.

His work has been performed and exhibited in many prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Park Avenue Armory, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; HOW Art Museum, Shanghai; SeMA, Seoul; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; and the Sundance Film Festival.

1 Quayola Pointillisme #01, 2021. Single-channel digital video with sound. 11:38 min.

In Promenade, artist Quayola collaborates with drone technology to expand how humans can experience a landscape. As a drone flies through the secluded forests of the Vallée de Joux in Switzerland, it analyzes the landscape with meticulous accuracy. Its observation takes on a detached emotional perspective in which nature is observed and decoded with precision, outweighing awe. Red and white tracking dots in the video, for example, are placed by the drone to map how its software sees a landscape.

Contemplating natural environments through such technological apparatuses offers an opportunity to devise new modes of visual synthesis and new interpretations of our relationship to traditional “landscape.” An autonomous vehicle outfitted with optical sensors and analytical tools to produce art aims at the heart of a global debate around machine creativity. In the case of a work like Promenade, the artist’s vision, augmentation, and obsession with visual aesthetics and sound underscore that the tools of technology are ultimately at the service of the creative act and artistic imagination.

2 Quayola Promenade, 2018. Single-channel digital video with sound. 20:36 min. (looped).

Red Ladder (Backstage) manifests many of the core elements of Navarro’s practice, from the functional made magical to the universal desire for a cathartic transcendence. Navarro’s sculptures also resonate more broadly with a universal drive for opportunity and/or transcendence. Often, his work takes the form of functional objects to encourage audiences to see the everyday as a heightened experience.

IVÁN NAVARRO (b. 1972, Santiago, Chile; lives and works in Brooklyn) uses electronic light as a sculptural and expressive material, rooted in early memories of confronting the trauma of living under Augusto Pinochet’s violent military dictatorship. Growing up with limited power and the fear of “being disappeared,” his politically charged installations and sculptures engage and implicate viewers with the Chilean regime’s crimes and global issues.

Navarro represented Chile at the 2009 Venice Biennale and has participated in shows at the Jersey City Museum, Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and others.

4 Iván Navarro Red Ladder (Backstage), 2005. Fluorescent lights, red color sleeves, metal fixtures.

In Cartoon Folding Screen, traditional Korean scroll ink paintings are met with a series of “visitors,” including familiar icons of antiquity and art history, unidentified flying objects, and snowfall coming across five synced screens. Arriving at the pace of gentle snowfall rather than bombs, the Western icons suggest cultural propagation between East and West in a scene that ultimately unfolds an overarching classical metaphor of longevity and resilience.

LEE NAM LEE (b. 1969, Damyang, South Korea; lives and works in Seoul) is a prolific video sculpture artist who applies animation to art history. His digital reinterpretations of traditional Asian art and classical works like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Van Gogh’s Starry Night blend cultural iconography and technology into post-modern narratives. Lee Nam views his work as moments for quiet retrospection and believes video uniquely captures human imagination.

He studied sculpture at Chosun University and earned a Doctorate in Fine Arts at Yonsei University. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Saatchi Gallery, and the National Museum of India, with pieces in prestigious permanent collections, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the Savina Museum.

5 Lee Nam Lee Cartoon Folding Screen, 2010. Five-channel digital video with sound. 11:14 min. (looped).

Pile up Life No. 2 is a sculpture of red LED counters attached to a fiberglass support. The object evokes a primordial lump of glowing earth in homage to the mysterious algorithm of life.

TATSUO MIYAJIMA (b. 1957, Tokyo; lives and works in Moriya, Japan) has created digital sculptures composed of LED counters since 1988. Trained as an oil painter and briefly a performance artist, his installations and sculptures have been exhibited in thirty countries. The LED counters, which display two numbers in red or green, count from one to nine, never zero. He contextualizes his digital sculptures within the framework of spiritual and philosophical systems. Miyajima’s work explores the function of time and space.

In 1988, Miyajima was invited to the Venice Biennale as a newcomer and attracted international attention for his works using digital figures. Since then, he has presented in many exhibitions and created many public artworks in Japan and around the world, including Taiwan, Germany, and the United States. In 2020, he received the 71st Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Fine Arts.

6 Tatsuo Miyajima

Pile Up Life No. 2, 2009–2016. Custom electronics, LEDs, electric hardware, fiberreinforced plastics, transformer.

When one first encounters Conversations with My Mother, it appears to be a nostalgic scene reminiscent of a domestic cupboard with nine old-fashioned push-button and rotary-wired telephones placed upon shelves. Upon closer view, it becomes apparent that the telephone receivers, off the base and lying on the last shelf, have their own story to tell. Each emits the sound of conversations between Janet Cardiff and her mother, Audrey, that took place during phone calls over the last eight years. Audrey Cardiff was 91 at the time this artwork was made. The conversations are meant as an intimate record of a mother/ daughter relationship. Like the cabinet that appears to be from a private, domestic space, the intimacy of the telephone offers access to the unique experience of intergenerational relationships.

JANET CARDIFF AND GEORGE BURES MILLER (CARDIFF & MILLER) (Cardiff, b. 1957, Ontario; Miller, b. 1960, Alberta; live and work in British Columbia) first collaborated in 1983 and, in the early 1990s, began creating multimedia installations together that bridge performance and sculpture. Immersive experiences, objects such as vintage organs and cabinets, sound, and unsettling narratives manipulate the perception of reality, transforming viewers into active participants and witnesses. Their interactive, site-specific audio and visual walks of international recognition have been in various locations worldwide, including museums, art biennials, libraries, and nature.

The award-winning pair has had numerous solo shows, including at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark; Vancouver Art Gallery; Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin; Modern Art Oxford; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. They also create site-specific commissions for venues and institutions, most recently at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Menil Collection in Houston, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

7 Cardiff & Miller Conversations with My Mother, 2024. Wooden cupboard with shelves, telephones, electronics, audio.

Shot on location in Elgin, Texas, in 2002, the narrative of Single Wide unfolds within the setting of a trailer home, revolving around a woman, a pickup truck, and the trailer. The camera travels in one steady movement, circling the outside of the house and the surrounding landscape, then passing through the exterior walls of the house to the interior, where we encounter a woman alone, walking through the rooms of the house. Eventually, she exits her home and enters a pickup truck to engage in a surreal collision that deconstructs the set. The camera movement implies a fracturing of the domestic space while echoing the physical and psychological turmoil of the female character coming to terms with her past, present, and future self.

TERESA HUBBARD AND ALEXANDER BIRCHLER (Hubbard, b. 1965, Ireland; Birchler, b. 1962, Switzerland; live and work in Texas) have collaborated as an artist team since 1990. Their work in time-based media aims to inspire sensory interactions and explore connections between social life, history, and memory. Hubbard and Birchler engage with fields of study conventionally considered the domain of the anthropologist, archaeologist, and historian.

In 2017, they represented Switzerland at the 57th Venice Biennale with the piece Flora in the Women of Venice exhibition curated by Philipp Kaiser. Their work is in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunstmuseum Basel, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, National Museum of Art Osaka, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. They have exhibited in venues including the Giacometti Institute in Paris, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Mori Museum in Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

8 Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler

Single Wide, 2002.

Single-channel video installation with sound. 6:07 min. (looped)

A cinematic unfolding of ambient light creates a perpetual morning in New Dawn. More than 16,000 LEDs animate a sequence of simulated shadows and sunshine through window blinds. New Dawn encapsulates our current mediated experience of contemporary reality in a world where it has grown increasingly difficult to separate reality from technological illusion. From this perspective it also recalls the traditional paradox of Plato’s Cave, engaging in a play of shadows which impairs our ability to authenticate, a tale that has grown increasingly relevant in the last decade. In this case, the artificiality of the setting is revealed as one views the back of the sculpture, purposefully accessible to reveal the truth of its materiality.

UVA (UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS) (founded 2003, London) is a London-based practice that combines new technologies with traditional media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and site-specific installation. Founded by British artist Matt Clark, UVA emerged from the electronic music scene, creating immersive stage designs for Massive Attack concerts and large-scale light art environments for galleries and museums. The studio draws inspiration from ancient philosophy and theoretical science, exploring structures that shape cognition. UVA’s works are performative time-based events, utilizing light, sound, and movement to manipulate perception and expose the relativity of experiences.

UVA has been commissioned internationally by institutions including the Barbican Curve Gallery, London; Manchester International Festival; Royal Academy of Arts; Serpentine Gallery, London; The Welcome Trust; Victoria & Albert Museum; YCAM, Tokyo, Japan and the Biennale of Sydney, amongst others. The studio’s work is collected by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, France, and MONA, Australia.

9 UVA (United Visual Artists) New Dawn, 2017. Two-channel digital video, custom electronics, LEDs, glass-reinforced resin, brass.

Inside a magic lantern box, Hiraki Sawa’s surreal animated video Absent comes to life as if it exists as a portal to another world or in a dream where dishes sprout legs and run from their homes. The wooden box dates from the 1800s, and it once held a magic lantern kit that could show moving images on circular slides with projected light, a Victorian-era prototype of modern cinema. Consequently, the work holds an inherent tension between internal and external experiences, absence and presence, and the past and present. Sawa filmed most of the landscapes in the American West during a road trip, edited together with a bank of footage from his previous work.

HIRAKI SAWA (b. 1977, Kanazawa, Japan; lives and works in London) earned international acclaim for his video artworks while still a graduate student at Slade School of Art in 2002. Psychological landscapes, domestic and imaginary spaces, fantasy and reality, animals, and inanimate objects populate his unexpected worlds. Melancholic and daydreaming characters that drift in search of their “place” in the universe echo Sawa’s own life experiences. His single- and multi-channel videos mix original and found photography to explore memory, migration, and displacement in time-based collages.

His work has been featured in the 2013 Biennale de Lyon, the 2010 Biennale of Sydney, the 2008 Busan Biennial, the 2005 Yokohama Trienniale, and the 2003 Biennale de Lyon.

10 Hiraki Sawa Absent, 2018. Single-channel digital video with sound and vintage magiclantern box.

Music by Yuko Ikoma. 4:37 min.

Recurrent Lloyd Wright is a recursive algorithmic animation that draws together the vast corpus of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” architectural blueprints and dissolves them into a fluid and purely visual representation. In the environment of this work, the modernist utopian vision of Lloyd Wright’s designs drifts back and forth and is endlessly remade. The sense of context and materials at the core of the architect’s vision evaporates into a virtual and speculative existence. In rendering atmospheric Lloyd Wright’s grounded design, Recurrent Lloyd Wright is at once a commentary on the fate of modernism and a blueprint to imagine future, possible architectures.

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER (b. 1967, Mexico City; lives and works in Montréal) is internationally renowned for his thoughtful use of software, custom coding, and digital displays to create poetic work that is as meaningful as it is engaging. His interactive installations link architecture, computerized surveillance, and public participation to evoke enlightenment, spirituality, and a consideration of some of the most important socio-political issues of our time.

He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the 52nd Venice Biennale and has received two BAFTA awards for Interactive Art. His public art has been commissioned by Mexico City, the Vancouver Olympics, and the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. Collections holding his work include MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, TATE in London, MAC and MBAM in Montreal, Jumex, and MUAC in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, MONA in Hobart, 21C Museum in Kanazawa, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, CIFO in Miami, MAG in Manchester, SFMOMA in San Francisco, ZKM in Karlsruhe, SAM in Singapore and many others.

11 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Recurrent Lloyd Wright, 2024.

Custom generative code, computer, display.

Descending the Parametric Staircase is a generative digital animation of an endlessly spiraling staircase displayed on a circular monitor on the floor. Occasionally, a virtual and nude human figure can be seen descending the staircase. “Parametric” software, which estimates variables’ distribution or parameters, allows animation of layered information or dimensions that coexist simultaneously even as they change. The work never repeats the same sequence of figures.

Lozano-Hemmer’s theme is an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s early twentieth-century work Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, which, as a seminal Cubist image, “mapped” the form of a three-dimensional figure moving in four dimensions onto a two-dimensional surface.

12 Rafael

Lozano-Hemmer

Descending the Parametric Staircase, 2018.

Generative custom software animation, custom LED screen, computer.

Thermal Drift is an interactive artwork that uses an infrared or thermal camera to capture the viewer’s image in the form of thermal energy emissions. The resulting energy map illustrated by Lozano-Hemmer’s software reveals the porous boundary between body and environment as heat data visually distorts the live, digital images of viewers and their surrounding space. The imagery is alluring, but the artist reminds us that our bodies are often being observed and recorded as thermal data maps— in police surveillance or in other public and private contexts— frequently without our knowledge.

13 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Thermal Drift, 2022. Generative custom software animation, thermal camera, computer, monitor.

Anadol sourced nearly three million photographs of Gothic and Renaissance-era cathedrals and input them into a learning algorithm for Machine Hallucinations. Similar to artificial intelligence, the program imagined hundreds of new cathedral plans by synthesizing the historic designs. This artwork represents ongoing advancements in computer systems designed to mimic human tasks like creativity, image comprehension, and logic.

REFIK ANADOL’S (b. 1985, Istanbul; lives and works in Los Angeles) practice is rooted in data and machine intelligence. He blends art, science, and technology to provoke questions of what it means to be human in the age of AI. Data and computer systems mimic the human cognitive skills of creativity, image comprehension, and logic—imagining an “unseen world” of alternate realities. Anadol’s AI data paintings often take the form of immersive audio and visual installations he describes as post-digital architecture.

His award-winning work has been exhibited internationally since 2008. In 2014, he officially founded Refik Anadol Studio and participated in Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence artist residency program in 2016. In 2023, Anadol was widely celebrated for a data painting in which he used artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than two hundred years of art at MoMA.

14 Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations— Study I, 2019. AI data painting with sound, custom hardware and software. 30 min.

This photograph is part of a larger series titled Phantom Limb, made before the creation of Photoshop, in which Hershman Leeson collaged utilitarian objects like electrical plugs in place of the limbs of female figures. In this photographic collage, Hershman Leeson imagines a technological chimera, partwoman, part-screen. This cyborg represents the co-option of the seduction of humans by digital media coupled with the prediction of a merging between humans and machines. Since the 1970s, Hershman Leeson has been an influential voice in the field of cyberfeminism, commenting on the role of technology in the representation of women’s bodies and identities. In Seduction, electronic mass media invades a bedroom’s intimacy. The image is indicative of an ongoing motif that is pervasive throughout her career, that of the cohabitation in our minds of both the fear of technology and recognition of its brilliance.

LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON (b. 1941, Cleveland; lives and works in San Francisco) is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues, including the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression.

Hershman Leeson is a recipient of many awards, including a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2022, she was awarded a special mention from the Jury for her participation in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. In 2023, the Pratt Institute of Art in NY awarded Hershman Leeson an honorary doctorate, Creative Capital awarded her their Distinguished Artist Award, and the SFMoMA acquired the museum’s first NFT from her.

15 Lynn Hershman Leeson Seduction, 1988. Gelatin silver print.

TRUTH consists of three videos derived from documentation of Greenberg’s durational performance, TRUTH, which took place in May 2023 at Powerhouse Arts in New York. The original work is a seven-hour-long battle of eight sword-wielding performers painted in black oil, dueling in a vermillion-colored pool. In this battle, the boundary lines between love and violence, as well as between performance and object, are constantly redrawn. In a scenario reminiscent of gaming culture, the action is abstract, and the suggestion of violence occurs in a safe space where no one can be hurt as avatar-like performers cathartically act out the drama. Reconceived as an immersive multi-channel installation, TRUTH is further intensified by an original soundtrack by Chino Amobi.

MILES GREENBERG (b. 1997, Montreal; lives and works in New York) is a performance and multimedia artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, multisensory, site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. Durational performances, often extreme, activate these installations and invoke the body as sculptural material. These performances are often captured in real-time before the audience to generate later video works and sculptures. Rigorous and ritualistic in its methodology, Greenberg’s universe relies on slowness and the decay of form to heighten the audience’s sensitivities. The work follows self-contained, nonlinear systems of logic understood in direct relation to one another. At age seventeen, Greenberg left formal education, launching himself into four years of independent research on movement and architecture. He has worked under the mentorship of Édouard Lock, Robert Wilson, and Marina Abramović. He was artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Miami (2023), La Manutention at Palais de Tokyo (2019), and The Watermill Center Residency, NY (2017 and 2018). In 2023, Greenberg was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art & Style. He has exhibited and performed internationally at museums and galleries, including The Louvre, Paris; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and The New Museum New York. Greenberg’s work has been in numerous international art surveys, including the Athens Biennial and BoCA Lisbon.

16 Miles Greenberg TRUTH, 2024. 3-channel video.

Burning House is one chapter of Ragnar Kjartansson’s ninechannel video artwork titled Scenes from Western Culture, in which he re-creates mundane moments from imagined affluent lifestyles. Together, the vignettes can be seen as a sympathetic satire of the so-called “good life,” displayed on wall-mounted monitors in a gallery like an exhibition of Old Master paintings. In Burning House, we see a scene of what was once (presumably) an idyllic vacation setting burning to the ground. However, there is a curious sense of objectivity present in this unfolding, more akin to how one would view a campfire, as opposed to a moment of urgency or demise. The sequence proceeds in real-time from a static camera position at dusk, with natural forest sounds and the roar of crackling fire. As in much of Kjartansson’s work, this moving image tableau could also be interpreted as a mirror for the human condition and/or a metaphor for the co-mingling of sorrow and happiness.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON (b. 1976, Iceland; lives and works in Reykjavík) creates video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings that blend historical and cultural references. He blurs the distinctions between mediums, likening his films to paintings and performances to sculpture. He explores beauty and its banality through durational, repetitive performance, with underlying connections of pathos and irony influenced by classical theater’s comedy and tragedy.

Major solo shows include exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reykjavík Art Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Kjartansson represented Iceland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th in 2013.

17 Ragnar Kjartansson Burning House, 2015. Single-channel digital video (color, sound).

Shot in the seventy-seventh-floor apartment of one of New York City’s many Trump Towers, Broker is a meticulous portrayal of a high-end real estate broker, seen here as the physical embodiment of the constantly accelerating pitch of luxury merchandising. The film uses the architecture of the apartment to create an echo chamber of lifestyle messages—messages that present an increasingly homogeneous (yet bespoke) utopian world for those with the means to buy it. With songs by Lori Scacco, this “filmed musical” magnifies the logic of marketing, the surfaces of luxury, and the sound of electronic speech, creating a sound and image world just on the edge of plausible.

JENNIFER AND KEVIN MCCOY (Jennifer McCoy b. 1968, Sacramento; Kevin McCoy b. 1967, Seattle; live and work in Brooklyn) create multimedia works that reexamine conventions in filmmaking, memory, and language. They utilize drawing, installation, live performance, painting, sculptural objects, software, and video to explore the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and society. Their early projects included database sculptures constructed of filtered television clips and miniature diorama film sets. Recent work reframes imagery of the American West with collaged databases of AI-generated landscape photography, emphasizing their idea of technology as an active force that shapes the human experience.

Among many venues in the US, Europe, and Asia, they have exhibited at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Film Institute Southbank in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Sundance Film Festival. Their work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the 21C Museum, and the Speed Museum. In 2022, Kevin received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for co-developing the technology that became the NFT.

18 Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Broker, 2016. 4K Video.

Expanding/Receding Squares is a commissioned “film quilt” on a lightbox comprised of 16mm filmstrips sewn and woven together with thread. The piece was created in response to the Thoma collection’s vast holdings of geometric and hard-edge paintings, especially evoking the work of Richard Anuszkiewicz. The commission was a more formal process than her other works, with more experimentation and focus on color over the film’s content. She incorporated orange—a reflection of the Thomas’ Southwest roots and touchstone of the Foundation’s identity, using previously off-printed film with more varied color tones.

SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER (b. 1977, Washington, DC; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an American artist known for her innovative work in film, photography, and textiles. She redefines women’s craft and filmmaking through her “film quilts,” made from sewn 16mm filmstrips discarded from the Anthology Film Archives. Sourced from a friend at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the footage varies in subject matter from the 1950s to the 1980s, ranging from art-centric to feminism to science. Gschwandtner watches the film, then cuts, sews, and weaves the filmstrips into traditional American quilt-making motifs. The quilts also vary in color, texture, and transparency. Her work has been acquired by renowned institutions, including LACMA, the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

19 Sabrina Gschwandtner

Expanding/Receding Squares, 2014. 16mm polyester film, polyester thread, lightbox frame.

Jamie Nares describes STREET as a love poem to New York, intended to capture the spirit of the city at a specific but seemingly ordinary moment in time. The video slowly pans the streets of New York with a high-definition camera normally used for recording hummingbirds and speeding bullets. Nares then slows the footage to create a continuous pan of pedestrians’ faces and movements. The soundtrack is performed on a twelvestring guitar by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. STREET is emblematic of a tradition of artists who conflate sound and vision to affect our cognition directly. How many times during an average week do we trek through an urban environment rife with visual and aural obstacles—music, billboards, data streams, chattering people, and other random stimuli—only to arrive at our destination with barely a recollection of what we saw or heard along the way? Artists like Jamie Nares explore our contemporary relationship with sensory overload, using strategies that essentially reboot our perception of perception itself.

JAMIE NARES (b. 1953, London; lives and works in New York) is a contemporary painter and video artist. She attended Chelsea Art School in London and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Inspired by “actualité and other document films,” her work includes sculptural, minimalist films. As a core member of the 1970s avant-garde scene, Nares has witnessed the East Village transform from an artist’s enclave to a luxury zone.

Her work often comments on New York’s shifting landscape and is represented at solo shows and major institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

20 Jamie Nares STREET, 2011. Single-channel digital video (color, sound).

The title of Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia) defines its departure point: Alice in Wonderland asks her father why things get in a muddle as they then begin to talk about language, using language in a dream-like manner. A glimpse through the looking glass begins to reveal an inversion of the customary order of things. For example, the father ingests smoke from his pipe, and playing cards fall out of the air in an orderly manner into Alice’s hand. The language of the two protagonists is strangely slurred and partially incomprehensible. Gradually the reason for these phenomena becomes clear. Almost all the passages are being played and spoken backward, and the tape can be played backward as well. The movements of the protagonists’ bodies look strangely mechanical as Hill makes phonetic notes of the texts spoken backward by Alice and her father. At the end of the tape, when Alice is standing in front of the looking glass, the letters of the subtitle (Come on Petunia) logically regroup as “once upon a time.”

GARY HILL (b. 1951 in Santa Monica, CA; lives and works in Seattle) is a first-generation video artist who is considered one of the foundational artists of media art, working from a language/conceptual base. He innovated the concept of video installation that incorporates video screens and projections into sculptural arrangements to stress the material presence of digital media. Hill is perhaps best known for his exploration of the physicality of language, synesthesia, and perceptual conundrums. His artwork has received critical celebration for its technical expertise and philosophical underpinnings, which he eloquently expresses in his published essays.

Hill received the 1995 Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art contemporain in Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; and most recently at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, among others.

21 Gary Hill

Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia), 1984. Single-channel video (color, sound).

In Objects with Destinations, objects from the artist’s studio (hammer, cathode ray tube, circuit board rack, chair, clip light) become the subjects for a series of short sequences in which a single object moves through a series of overlapping transformations. These are electronically altered in such a way that their coloration and contours continuously morph. As the transparent images are superimposed one upon the other and fade in and out, they become slightly displaced, giving the impression that the objects are “wandering” across the image plane. In some sequences, the contours and colors of the objects dissociate, or newly arising color fields spread across the pictorial surface. The superimpositions and cross-dissolves result in a minimal amount of action, consistent with the “destinations” implied in the work’s title.

22 Gary Hill

Objects with Destinations, 1979.

Single-channel video (color, silent).

Grand Central Station No. 3 is from Campbell’s LowResolution Works series. Despite its intentionally low resolution, Campbell’s artwork is not low technology. The work depicts commuters walking across the platform of Manhattan’s busy Grand Central train station. The seemingly endless flow of anonymous humans through the space, interpreted through 1,728 LEDs, forms a rhythmic pattern of data and pulsing light. Campbell spread out the LEDs in a diffuse grid, taking advantage of our brain’s natural ability to organize fragmented visual information into a coherent narrative. Viewers must fill in the pixelated gaps with prior knowledge about how humans are shaped and how they move, efficiently linking perception with information.

JIM CAMPBELL (b. 1956, Chicago; lives and works in San Francisco), a pioneering media artist, is known primarily for his mesmerizing LED light works. In the early ’80s, after earning degrees in mathematics and engineering from MIT, Campbell moved from Chicago to San Francisco to work as an engineer in Silicon Valley and in filmmaking. He soon shifted to electronic and video art forms. In his “lowresolution” work, Campbell experiments with abstraction, perception, and representation. His video installations and electronic sculptures merge the analog and digital through custom LEDs, circuit boards, and viewing apparatuses. While his work may be primarily created with technologies designed for pure information transfer, his output is exceedingly human and rife with associations of memory and human perception.

Campbell’s work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.

23 Jim Campbell Grand Central No. 3, 2009.

LEDs, custom electronics, Plexiglas diffusion screen.

In Caryatid (Stiverne), Pfeiffer samples a televised clip of heavyweight boxer Bermane Stiverne losing his world title in a 2015 championship fight, a fight that lasted only two minutes and fifty-nine seconds before the boxer was knocked out and subsequently hospitalized. He erases Stiverne’s opponent through meticulous digital editing to further imbue the scene with psychological potency. The title Caryatid refers to a style of Classical statuary of ritual dancers (such as those on the Acropolis in Athens), thereby revealing Pfeiffer’s intention to transform a moving image of the boxer into a moving image sculpture carved by the extreme force of his opponent. By linking ancient sculpture with contemporary mass-media imagery, Pfeiffer charts a continuum throughout human culture, where bodily violence is fetishized for public entertainment.

PAUL PFEIFFER (b. 1966, Honolulu; lives and works in New York) is a photographer, sculptor, and video artist. He emerged around 2000 with digitally manipulated clips of popular media from movies, sports, and television. He shapes the conditions of perception by erasing and isolating subjects and figures of historical importance, using television as a model of study that deals with overwhelming situations. He critiques exploitation in the entertainment industry, including the relationship between black bodies and spectacle.

His works have been shown in many institutions, including the Duke University Museum of Art, the Barbican Arts Centre, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2024, his work was celebrated at The Geffen Contemporary, LA MOCA, with a twenty-five-year survey.

24 Paul Pfeiffer Caryatid (Stiverne), 2018.

Single-channel SD video (color, silent), chrome 32” CRT monitor.

Underground Circuit is a collage of hundreds of black and white video clips shot in the subway stations of New York. The installation has its viewers looking down into this spiraling pool of humanity. From station to station, the movement of the commuters in the outer rings suggests the repetitive cycle of life in the mode of urban theatricality and texture. The innermost ring includes people sitting on benches waiting. The audio is a repetitive percussive march, as the central drummers act as controllers of the movement, inspired by the concept of the Four-Faced Buddha in Chinese folk religion, the god who can fulfill and grant all wishes of its devotees.

YUGE ZHOU 周雨歌 (b. 1985, Beijing; lives and works in Chicago) is an installation and video artist known for her cubist collages exploring isolation, connection, and transient encounters in natural and urban landscapes. Zhou came to the US almost two decades ago to earn a degree in computer science and subsequently moved into video art and installations. As she has moved between continents and from the East Coast to the Midwest, she has become deeply intrigued with transient encounters across shared constructed or natural spaces. Her recent projects explore the geographical, historical, and emotional distance between her homeland and America—her adopted country—and the broader challenges of transcending separation. Zhou has exhibited nationally and internationally in prominent art and public venues. Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Atlantic and was recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. She is the recipient of the 2024 Joyce Foundation Artadia Award and a 2021 Artist Fellowship Award in Media Arts from the Illinois Arts Council.

25 Yuge Zhou 周雨歌 Underground Circuit, 2017.

Video, media player, square monitor embedded in pedestal.

Blue Phased MPD (25 heads) is a video sculpture featuring projected talking faces on a grid of fiberglass heads. Speaking stream-of-consciousness chatter at different volumes and moods, the faces represent the chorus of inner voices that sometimes invade our minds. The twenty-five personalities are here performed by a single actress. Occasionally, one of the heads will remove itself from the crowd to reveal a single foam head with a blank image. A viewer can observe the actress pulling her head from a curtain, then the studio interior as the curtain closes, thereby breaking the fourth wall of theatrical illusion.

TONY OURSLER (b. 1957, New York) is a multimedia artist based in New York, known for his installation, painting, performance, video, and sculpture work. While studying at the California Institute of Arts, Oursler was influenced by John Baldessari, who taught him, Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Jim Shaw, all of whom had a shared affinity for the importance of the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language. A pioneering figure in new media since the 1970s, Oursler has explored diverse methods of incorporating video into his practice, breaking video art out of the two-dimensional screen. Oursler’s work is consistently informed by his persistent preoccupation with technology and its effect on humanity.

He has exhibited his work at museums such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, as well as institutions in London, Melbourne, Madrid, Edinburgh, Dusseldorf, and many others.

26 Tony Oursler Blue Phased MPD (25 heads), 1999. Single-channel digital video (color, sound), 25 sculpted ovals (fiberglass, foam, resin) in five panels.

Eye See You is a light sculpture comprising two dichromatic glass disks on a stand, meant to evoke the shape of an eyeball. The two disks are installed in front of a bright mono-frequency bulb mounted at the center of a mirror-polished bowl. The disks change color according to the viewer’s position and movement. Visitors and surroundings are reflected in the glass disks, creating a gentle moiré, or wavy pattern, effect.

The mirrored bowl evokes the sun as both sustenance and threat, forcing us to consider the transformative power of light in technology. Eliasson’s glass disks, responsive to observers’ movements, reflect the dynamic interplay between humanity and the digital realm.

OLAFUR ELIASSON (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) creates sculptures and large-scale installations primarily using elemental materials, including water, light, air, and temperature. Like the Light & Space art movement of the ’60s, Eliasson uses the medium to atmospheric effect. His solo shows feature installation, painting, sculpture, photography, and film to explore perception, experimentation, and environmental awareness.

In 1995, he founded Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a spatial research laboratory; in 2014, he started Studio Other Spaces, with collaborator and architect Sebastian Behmann, as an office for architecture and art. Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and installed The Weather Project later that year, which has been described as “a milestone in contemporary art” in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London.

28 Olafur Eliasson

Eye See You, 2006. Stainless steel, aluminum, color-effect filter glass, mono-frequency bulb.

Exhibition Checklist

1 Quayola (1982–) Pointillisme #01, 2021.

2 Quayola (1982–) Promenade, 2018. Single-channel digital video with sound. 20:36 min. (looped). Photo courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery, New York.

3 Iván Navarro (1972–) Red Ladder (Backstage), 2005. Fluorescent lights, red color sleeves, metal fixtures. Photo © Iván Navarro, courtesy of the artist and Phillips, New York.

4 Lee Nam Lee (1969–) Cartoon Folding Screen II, 2010. Five-channel digital video with sound. 11:14 min. (looped). Photo © Lee Nam Lee, courtesy of the artist.

5 Tatsuo Miyajima (1957–) Pile Up Life No. 2, 2009–2016. Custom electronics, LEDs, electric hardware, fiberreinforced plastics, transformer.

Photo courtesy of the artist and SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo.

6 Cardiff (1957–) & Miller (1960–) Conversations with my Mother, 2024. Wooden cupboard with shelves, telephones, electronics, audio.

Photo courtesy of the artists, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

7 Teresa Hubbard (1965–) and Alexander Birchler (1962–) Single Wide, 2002. Single-channel video installation with sound. 6:07 min. (looped). Photo courtesy of the artists.

8 UVA (United Visual Artists) (founded 2003) New Dawn, 2017. Two-channel digital video, custom electronics, LEDs, glass-reinforced resin, brass. Photo by Kate Weinstein, © United Visual Artists, courtesy of the artists.

9 Hiraki Sawa (1977–) Absent, 2018. Single-channel digital video with sound and vintage magic-lantern box. Music by Yuko Ikoma. 4:37 min.

10 Rafael LozanoHemmer (1967–) Recurrent Lloyd Wright, 2024. Custom generative code, computer, display. Photo by Tyler Rutledge, © Antimodular Research, courtesy of the artist, Antimodular Research, and bitforms gallery, New York.

11 Rafael LozanoHemmer (1967–) Thermal Drift, 2022. Generative custom software animation, thermal camera, computer, monitor. Photo © Antimodular Research, courtesy of the artist and Antimodular Research.

12 Rafael LozanoHemmer (1967–) Descending the Parametric Staircase, 2018. Generative custom software animation, custom LED screen, computer.

13 Refik Anadol (1985–) Machine Hallucinations— Study I, 2019. AI data painting with sound, custom hardware and software. 30 min.

14 Lynn Hershman Leeson (1941–) Seduction, 1988. Gelatin silver print.

15 Miles Greenberg (1997–) TRUTH, 2024. Three-channel video. 15:23 min.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

16 Ragnar Kjartansson (1976–)

Burning House, 2015. Single-channel digital video with sound. 92 min.

Photo courtesy of the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

17 Jennifer McCoy (1968–) and Kevin McCoy (1967–) Broker, 2016. 4K video. 28:02 min. Photo courtesy of the artists.

18 Sabrina Gschwandtner (1977–) Expanding/Receding Squares, 2014. 16mm polyester film, polyester thread, lightbox frame. Photo by Claire Britt, © Sabrina Gschwandtner, courtesy of the artist.

19 James Nares (1953–) STREET, 2011. Single-channel digital video with sound. 61 min. Photo courtesy of the artist.

20 Gary Hill (1959–) Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia), 1984. Single-channel video. 32 min. (looped). Photo courtesy of the artist.

21 Gary Hill (1959–) Objects with Destinations, 1979. Single-channel video. 3:40 min. (looped). Photo courtesy of the artist.

22 Jim Campbell (1956–) Grand Central No. 3, 2009. LEDs, custom electronics, Plexiglas diffusion screen. Photo by Joseph Rynkiewicz, courtesy of the artist.

23 Paul Pfeiffer (1966–) Caryatid (Stiverne), 2018. Digital video (looped), chromed television, DVD player, Plexiglas case on pedestal.

24 Yuge Zhou 周雨歌 (1985–) Underground Circuit, 2017. Video, media player, monitor embedded in pedestal. 3 min. (looped). Photo courtesy of the artist.

25 Tony Oursler (1985–) Blue Phased MPD (25 heads), 1999. Single-channel digital video, 25 sculpted ovals (fiberglass, foam, resin) in five panels. 36:08 min. (looped). Photo © Tony Oursler, courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York.

26 Olafur Eliasson (1967–)

Eye See You, 2006. Stainless steel, aluminum, coloreffect filter glass, mono-frequency bulb.

Photo by Christian Uchtmann, courtesy of the artist and Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin.

“Marilynn and I believe we have a cultural obligation to share our collection. We are just caregivers from one generation to the next. When you are passionate about building a diverse collection, it’s a gift to be able to share it with others.”

—Carl Thoma

Based in Dallas, Texas, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection includes over 1,900 works and spans four broad fields: Art of the Spanish Americas, Digital & Media Art, Japanese Bamboo, and Post-War Painting & Sculpture. In addition to exhibiting our collection at our two free gallery spaces, Art Vault in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and our Cedar Springs Headquarters in Dallas, the Foundation has loaned over 1,400 artworks to more than 250 exhibitions worldwide. Our efforts to increase accessibility in the arts include awarding grants and fellowships to support original scholarship across each collection area, supporting lectures, symposia, and class visits to our exhibition spaces, and giving grants to nonprofit organizations for innovative exhibitions, academic programs, and publications.

In 2024, the Foundation launched the Thoma Scholars Program to help broaden access to higher education for promising students in the rural American Southwest. The Thoma Scholars Program is more than just a full-ride scholarship—with the assistance of our university partners, we help students succeed long after obtaining their degrees by providing opportunities for one-on-one mentorship, leadership training, academic advising, and career coaching.

Museum Loan Program

Through our Museum Loan Program, the Thoma Foundation has loaned over 1,400 artworks from our diverse collection to over 250 exhibitions worldwide. We make a concerted effort to share our collection with the public, conserve the works in it, and provide documentation and research that puts each piece into context.

We accept loan requests from organizations for exhibitions and long-term loans in permanent exhibitions that provide promising new insight into the fields of art in which we collect. We encourage exhibitions and research that coincide with groundshifting concepts.

Learn more at www.thomafoundation.org/ museum-loan-program