360: Jeremy Couillard

About

Constructing his work from miscellaneous objects, spaces, and anthropomorphic characters, Couillard developed the psychedelic painting style that inspires his digital works during his MFA in painting at Columbia University. His work allows viewers to travel seamlessly into other dimensions filled with cartoon-like creatures and fragments of video-game architecture. These supernatural universes point at the inherent biases of the physical world, but also at their prevalence in the digital one, inviting a reflection on altered states of consciousness and metaphysics.

The Founders of Daytona Beach Also Founded Dayton, Ohio 2018 is a new work premiering as part of 360. It references the experiences of visions and altered ways of seeing, alluding to a variety of prophetic seers from eastern mystics, to stock market traders to historical figures such as William Blake. Couillard draws upon the conventions of 3D video games, transporting you to an imagined landscape in which your disembodied form, directed by your line of sight, floats past alien creatures and absurd scenarios that evoke the kind of visual logic of dreams or out of body experiences. As you progress guided by voices and snippets of sounds from a radio tuner, you’re invited to collect seven hidden syllables that once gathered will allow you to return to a corporeal form.