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Apple and Oculus Rift Spoofs as Sculptures

Meet Evan Yee, the artist making physical versions of digital objects.
Images courtesy the artist

StartUp, the new show by Evan Yee at Gallery 151, is as much a collection of his sculptures as it is a showroom for tech consumables. The gallery has been made to look like a concept store, a setting that helps Yee cast his works as mass-produced gadgetry. Yee’s sculptures could be Shanzhai knockoffs—Chinese niche innovations on popular tech toys—describes a future that gives life to the easy association of technology, convenience, capitalism and utopia.

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iWait

Many of Yee’s sculptures make direct references to popular Apple products: iSimulate, a water jet-cut block of “aircraft grade” aluminum looks like an iPhone and is doubly advertised as an aide to those who need to “wean themselves off their iPhone addiction,” or for those without iPhones who need a prop to “keep with the trend.” iWait, “the Pinwheel of Death in physical form” gives Apple’s spinning rainbow graphic a polished physical encasing. In three sizes throughout the gallery, it most dramatically frames a future cheerily announcing that all hope is lost.

Over the phone, Yee tells The Creators Project that he's particularly interested in a “new sense of the pursuit of Utopia.” iFlip is an hourglass timer in an iPhone encasement. Marketed explicitly as a revolutionary new game in Yee’s App Store, it is perhaps uniquely able to give insight into the texture his Utopia might take. In a spoof promotional video, Siri sells the demure sculpture as “the only game you need to play.” Using her most bombastic voice, Siri advertises the dust of 100 crushed iPhones that passes between the two chambers of the iFlip as its most radical contribution to the gaming paradigm of the future; the iFlip is “not just a game but a preservation of time; a preservation of you.” A shifting conflation of memory and waste describes a Utopia, like the regrowth of nature in Chernobyl’s shadow.

Hello, an aluminum monolith jutting out of a round crag in the back of the gallery, is easily mistaken for a set piece from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Approaching the sculpture triggers Siri to ask, “How many times have you pleasured yourself today?” Siri has none of Hal’s warmth, which makes the question feel as much an intimate reminder as a reprimand.

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While the majority of the sculptures in StartUp are made to look clean, precisely made, and sleek, Yee has also worked with New York Art Foundry to have the cardboard-and-duct tape Noculous Rift, and his twig-and-glue quadcopter drone, Carrier, bronzed. Noculous Rift, a version of the Oculus Rift, uses two iPhones to create a stereoscopic virtual reality experience. Unlike other VR systems meant to help ease people from the corporeal world into the other reality of the goggles, the weight of Noculous Rift ensures that at least some of your body will have difficulty crossing over. Bronzing Carrier pacifies the most threatening of the visual hallmarks of drones; their precise, silent, and undetectable movements appear slow, clunky, heavy and comic.

StartUp grew out The App Store, a similar body of work that Yee created for Parrish Art Museum’s Road Show in 2014 and opened in an Apple retailer on Long Island. StartUp will stay at Gallery 151 through an indeterminate date near the end of July.

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