LaTurbo Avedon: Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror
Mar 3–Oct 26, 2021
LaTurbo Avedon, screenshot of Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror at sunrise, 2021
For Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror, LaTurbo Avedon created fourteen videos depicting digital flythroughs of a 3D apartment within the frame of a virtual mirror that is overlaid on whitney.org. Seven scenes for sunrise and sunset, respectively, are shuffled for playback each day of the week, offering glimpses into the apartment inhabited by Avedon's virtual selves.
For the past ten years, LaTurbo Avedon has worked only as an avatar, spending thousands of hours on the creation and exploration of virtual worlds and identities. Their fascination with virtual mirrors led them to create a proposal for a mirror emoji, which was accepted and released as part of the Unicode 13.0 emoji character library.
Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror communicates peculiarities of virtual reflection, rendering scenes that exist at the threshold of virtual worlds and the environments in which our computers reside. The mirror functions as both a surface for reflection and a window into a different world, showing nature flourishing across living rooms as well as green screens and stage lights consuming the home studio. As online communication has become a dominant mode of connection during the time of global lockdowns, Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror highlights the blurring of our virtual and physical existence and the pauses, repetitions, and transformations occurring in a state of shelter and isolation.
LaTurbo Avedon (b. 1988) is an avatar and artist creating work that emphasizes the practice of non-physical identity and authorship. Avedon has spent the past decade exploring the ever-growing intensity of the relationship between users and virtual experiences, pursuing creative environments that deepen the meaning of memories found in cyberspace. They curate and design Panther Modern, a file-based exhibition space that encourages artists to create site-specific installations for the Internet. Avedon's process of character creation spans gaming, performance, and exhibitions. Their work has appeared internationally at venues including TRANSFER Gallery (New York), transmediale (Berlin), Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, the Whitney Museum (New York), HMVK (Dortmund), the Barbican Centre (London), Galeries Lafayette (Paris), and the Manchester International Festival.
Sunrise/Sunset was a series of Internet art projects that marked sunset and sunrise in New York City every day from 2009 to 2024. All were commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a time frame of ten to thirty seconds.
Indicating the switch from day to night and vice versa in one specific location, Sunrise/Sunset projects played with the perception of time and space, underscoring the physical location of the Whitney Museum and the global accessibility of virtual space. The series was organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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