The City of West Hollywood announces the debut of the next exhibition in the Moving Image Media Art (MIMA) program and the worldwide debut of FLUTTER, a film in three parts, from artist Carrie Chen. MIMA is an ongoing exhibition series of moving image media artworks on multiple digital billboards at various locations along Sunset Boulevard.
FLUTTER, Part I will air for three-and-a-half minutes at the top of every hour and FLUTTER Parts II & III will follow at 20 and 40 minutes past each hour, respectively, on the Netflix Invisible Frame billboard, located on the Sunset Strip at 8743 Sunset Boulevard from Wednesday, June 1, 2022, through Wednesday, September 30, 2022.
Based on a stanza from the ancient poetry anthology Book of Songs: 虫飞薨薨，甘与子同梦 (Translation: “Insects sound like the fluttering of wings, I want to fall into a dream with you.”) Carrie Chen’s FLUTTER 虫飞薨薨 series describes the experience of existing in ambiguity and the flickering feelings that radiate across a corporeal surface.
Living in limbo can precipitate the entire spectrum of human emotion. An allegory of subjective memory, FLUTTER portrays us as we hold our past, some more vigilantly than others. FLUTTER’s debut on the Invisible Frame billboard will allow each of these three quiet and mystical creatures to exist in its own splendid moment, paying homage to the push-pull of revelation within us all. Memories surface and recede; moods flutter and reflect, like wings, subject to the inevitability of change.
Artist Carrie Chen is a Los Angeles-based artist working in simulation, projection, and Virtual Reality. With a background in Art History and Psychology, her moving image work explores our relationships with natural phenomena, virtual beings, architecture, and the sublime. While drawing on personal history, East Asian myths and rituals, and the technological mediations that facilitate the exchange between human and non-human interactions, Chen considers each character she creates (whether that is a human or a ladybug) to be a surrogate of artificial experience. In the final weeks of pursuing an MFA from UCLAs School of Design Media Arts, Chen is researching and developing new ways for users to interact with virtual environments. Through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, feminist perspective, Chen reconsiders how user agency and emotional stimuli are constructed, embedded, perceived, and experienced.
The Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA) is a City of West Hollywood exhibition series administered by the City’s Arts Division, as part of its Art on the Outside Program, and is presented with the Sunset Arts and Advertising Program. MIMA offers artists the opportunity, and the funding, to create immediate, remarkable, and ambitious works of art that engage with the unique visual landscape of the world-famous Sunset Strip, and experiment with the state-of-the-art technology of high-definition digital signage.
MIMA enables artists to occupy, contest, and play with the boundaries and uses of public space and manifest moments of connection and awe. Carrie Chen was selected for exhibition from the MIMA Prequalified List, a rolling, open-call opportunity for moving image media artists, with applications reviewed bi-annually by the City of West Hollywood’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission, in November and May. The MIMA Prequalified List includes a diverse list of artists of all career levels from emerging to internationally recognized.
The City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division delivers a broad array of arts programs including Art on the Outside (temporary public art), City Poet Laureate, Drag Queen Story Hour, Free Theatre in the Parks, Grants, Holiday Programming, Human Rights Speaker Series, Library Exhibits, National Poetry Month, WeHo Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival, Summer Sounds + Winter Sounds, Urban Art (permanent public art), and WeHo Reads. For more information about City of West Hollywood arts programming, please visit www.weho.org/arts.
For more information about FLUTTER contact the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Manager Rebecca Ehemann at rehemann@weho.org or (323) 848-6846. For people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, please call TTY (323) 848-6496.
