screencapture from http://distantfeel.com/

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If you are around Pittsburgh these days, make sure to catch Distant Feel, the solo exhibition of ANTOINE CATALA presented at Carnegie Museum of Art, before it closes on May 18. For this exhibition, the French artist now based in New York has created a website (http://distantfeel.com/) that explores just like the show in Pittsburgh, ‘how images provoke emotion, especially as they travel virtual and physical distances via the internet’ according to the press release.

Exhibitions that organise themselves around sociological issues are not new but the fact that CATALA collaborated with a New York advertising agency called Droga5 to develop a new approach to the sentiment of empathy, reveals how the so-called soft, emotion-oriented imagery is becoming more important economically and how the desire to create personal and social meaning beyond economic utility seems to be stronger than ever. The exhibition not only questions the way people address the relation between emotion and virtual images but also how do artists reflect the ambivalence of personal and social empathy between the two poles of authenticity and staged seduction.

If you can’t see the exhibition, a few images are available on http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/. Please note also that ANTOINE CATALA is currently presenting a project entitled Jardin synthétique à l’isolement (Synthetic Garden to Isolation) (2014-2015) at Musee d’Art Contemporain in Lyon until July 12, 2015.

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