News

Hidden Landscapes of the Corporate Cloud: from Kent Wilson’s Cloud Capitol Opens in Berkeley

Berkeley, California, U.S.A. – March 5, 2018:

Kent Wilson’s timely and provocative work, Cloud Capitol, opens with a reception on March 18, 2018 at The LightRoom Gallery, 2263 Fifth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710.

The show is on view from March 13 through April 13, 2018. The gallery reception is open to the public from 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm on Sunday, March 18, 2018.

Cloud Capitol uses hybrid digital production and handcraft to create visual narratives that grapple with themes of corporate totalitarianism and the degradation of democracy within the neoliberal police state.

Kent Wilson is an artist, architectural designer, university lecturer and fabrication specialist with a Master of Architecture degree from UC Berkeley, and background in business and consumer marketing. Kent grew up in the heart of the industrial South, in the struggling former textile-manufacturing town of Columbus, Georgia, where he experienced first-hand the devastating effects of capitalism on commerce, community, people and nature.

The images in Cloud Capitol construct elegies to human vitality, natural diversity, and curiosity, erased by the technological dominance of the corporate cloud.

For many, the historic US Capitol Building symbolizes unity and collectivity in the United States. It frequently appears in media as shorthand for the hope and potential of American Democracy. Cloud Capitol now evokes the monstrous parallel reality beneath that façade as Capitalism, rather than Democracy, defines the structure.

Cloud Capitol’s imagery deploys what Kent calls a “new digital romanticism” to illustrate the contradictory nature of profit maximization technology as mediator of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The work toggles between material and digital investigations to disrupt form and perception, as Kent pushes the limits of technological tools and embraces the resulting anomalies as metaphor.