
ETA @ VisArts, Nov 15 – Jan 25, 2025
Rockville, MD: https://www.visartscenter.org/
ETA is an exhibition of works by Mollye Bendell, JLS Gangwisch, and Christopher Kojzar, members of the Baltimore-based collective strikeWare. Curated by VisArts’ 2024 Emerging Curator Jordan Horton, the exhibition seeks to address spaces in between and the people who exist there.
The title references the acronym “expected time of arrival,” a phrase derived from the popular concept based on the speed by which a vessel has covered the distance traveled. Online, these spaces are known as liminal, expanding beyond the physical realm to exist in technology through mediums such as buffering webpages and loading pages. Although this method cannot account for unexpected events, it provides a useful estimate for planning purposes. ETA, therefore, represents a journey from point A to B, naive to any sudden disruption or error.
As a collective, strikeWare utilizes multimedia to comment on the lines of human and user experience. While the trio is best known for their site specific works informed by historical events in the places they show, this exhibition strives to abstract place and spatial relations, querying the concept of the journey over the destination and all that one may encounter in between. For these newly commissioned works, Bendell, Gangwisch, and Kojzar bridge the liminal spaces we subliminally encounter physically and
digitally.
Beyond mere object kinetics, ETA (the concept) is also a metaphor for situations where nothing physically moves. One of those metaphors can be adapted to describe the time calculated to complete a task, be it work undertaken by an individual or a computation undertaken by a computer program. This metaphor plays out in the artists’ use of AI computer processing and virtual reality in their practices.
Inspiration for ETA came from a wide array of transit-related happenings in Maryland, from the sudden and tragic Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore to the placement of VisArts in Rockville, which is situated in the Interstate 270 Technology Corridor. The artwork aims to comment on the spaces many people move through, the unnoticed aspects until disturbed, and the political implications of the state of transportation and movement.
To further illustrate the show’s theme, the three artists live in different parts of the United States, adding a compelling dimension to their exploration of transitory dwelling and how a collective continues to stay together despite being miles apart. VisArts’ Kaplan Gallery reunites their collective while allowing the artists to meditate upon how distance has challenged and alternated their joint practice and allowed their separate ones to prosper.
https://www.visartscenter.org/event/eta_emergingcurator2024_jordan_horton