Flash Frame
October 17 – December 1, 2023
Curated by Sandy Peña and John L’Étoile
Part of the 2023 Curator Series, featuring work by Nathaniel Benjamin, John L’Étoile, Aaron Patrick, Luke Rizzotto, and Sandy Peña.
Flash Frame explores the blurred lines between the digital and the real. Digital spaces we inhabit effectively remove us and transport us to a different realm. They are ephemeral places where the location is not as relevant as your intention and attention. When in a digital space, our terrestrial self goes into an autopilot and our motivated actions exist solely within the screen.
To inhabit space is to belong. When our sense of belonging is stripped, where can we go? Priced out of physicality, we seek refuge in digital landscapes. Video games, films, music – digital media obscures perceptions of the physical and non-physical with the creation of alternate realities to play and exist within. The new Wild West.
We attempt to take viewers into a digital expanse. Open maps of procedurally generated space. Nothing stays forever on a motherboard or SSD, the media is available to be perceived only on its proprietary technology with connection to electricity. It leaves no mark on the landscape but the empty screen that once held it. An expanse of space given only for the emptiness remains.
Our aesthetic choices have been influenced by the early days of digital media, and the few years where the true transition took place from physical media to online only, the 1990s to 2010s. This includes the VHS aesthetic and chunky electronics. The time when “digitality” seemed to be only a novelty, as opposed to now when it has morphed our whole world into just a cradle for the screen.
John L’Etoile is a photographer and videographer based in Reno, Nevada. His
work includes documentary, music and editorial photography and cinematography. He enjoys spending time exploring the landscape, connecting with people and finding new ways of thinking and being. His photos serve as a way to remember the beauty we experience and to create new worth in the calculated render and distillation of vanishing time.
Sandy Peña is a digital artist from Las Vegas, NV. She’s attracted to immersive video and animation that reevaluates our relationship to physical space and how we distinguish the digital from the real. Through her own work, she hopes the world-building and measured nature of frame-by-frame media allows others to examine control and performance within their own lives. She received a BA in Digital Media with a minor in Journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. She’s currently a video editor and content creator for PBS Reno.
Special thanks to Donté Miller, Matthew L’Étoile, and our volunteers Diana Kathleen Bradbury, David Delfin, Rachel Dickson, Ashley Frost, and Toni Ortega.
More photos on our Flickr | Exhibition Handout | This is Reno News Feature | KWNK Surf’s Up with Sandy and John
Flash Frame is part of the 2023 Curator Series which is supported in part by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
