Sarah Contos: Eye Lash Horizon

Artificial intelligence is a spectral presence in contemporary life. New, strange, and unsettling, there is a sense of inevitability about its dominance over humanity. But in Eye Lash Horizon at UNSW Galleries, Sarah Contos presents work that asserts artistic control over AI, questioning its intelligence and intensifying its artificiality.

Eye Lash Horizon is the first solo exhibition by Sarah Contos in a major public institution. Occupying the full ground floor of UNSW Galleries, Contos has spent a year preparing four rooms of installations, each named for an anatomical or metaphysical theme—Brain; Womb; Belly; Soul—and each with its own distinct character, materials, and influences from popular culture. Though comprised entirely of new work completed in 2023 and 2024, Eye Lash Horizon is presented as a thematic survey of two decades of Contos’ practice—a distillation and continuation of longstanding conceptual and material interests.

You enter Eye Lash Horizon by way of the Womb. Inside, the walls are clad in black plastic, enveloping you along with the room’s only work: a large, three-channel video installation, MoTH-eRR, 2023. A loose narrative of metamorphosis and hybridisation moves across all three channels with fast-moving montages of photographic stills—black and white images of female Pierrot figures, colour images of make-up, moths, eggs, and eyes. Accompanying the montage is a pulsing, synthetic score reminiscent of Vangelis’ electronic work on films like Blade Runner, 1982.

But the intense stimulation of MoTH-eRR distracts from an uncanny truth: the images in MoTH-eRR all have something wrong. Created using generative artificial intelligence, Contos leans into AI’s “hallucinations,” errors by a non-conscious machine’s responses to conscious, human prompts. Hands have seven fingers. Figures have three arms. Irises and pupils blend into impossible, kaleidoscopic spaces. What Contos has created—or has edited from AI creations—is a perfect, digital fiction.

The Brain houses a single, sprawling installation: Universes Built and Destroyed in a Dressing Room of a Protagonist Yet to be Born, 2024. (Brain is the second room you encounter, but the first in the intended logic of the exhibition.) A substantial work comprised of dozens of sculptural pieces, Contos redeploys many familiar materials—repurposed cane furniture, adorned with leather and chains; a quilt with digital prints, reminiscent of her Ramsay Prize winning artwork, The Long Kiss Goodbye, 2016; hand-cast aluminium pieces; and a litany of surprising found and crafted objects, from volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia to jars of pickles to wooden phalluses ejaculating strings of pearls.

The work proves that human creativity is just as hallucinatory as artificial intelligence. Contos enters a game with the viewer, as we are asked in turn to question our own pareidolia, the tendency to find meaning in random phenomena. She builds a metal frame with a wig, six pairs of sunglasses, a black glove, and a folding fan, and we interpret this construction of inanimate objects as a “person.” It is absurd, theatrical, and intensely fun. One also feels the extremely personal nature of the work, perhaps that the “protagonist yet to be born” refers to a younger self.

Belly is a room of suspended cocoons and moults. Each of the five, woollen cocoons feels like it could host an interior life with structures rising from within, such is Contos’ mastery of form with the tufting gun. The works must be incredibly heavy and are held up only with significant support from steel frames. Yet there is a paradoxical lightness and an impressive equilibrium that stabilises each work, despite only having one fixed point to the ceiling. There has been great consideration in the execution and display of these works—and, indeed, the whole exhibition—for which the artist, curator Karen Hall, and the installation team at UNSW Galleries should be commended.

Which leads us to the Soul. Where Old Trees Are Spaceships and Rocks are Snow, 2024, is a fountain installation. Contos has constructed a steel scaffold with aluminium sculptures rich in metaphor, including of arum lilies and owls. The base of the sculpture is made from prior, melted sculptures and painted over with a dark, glittering paint. There is a true metamorphosis here: old works broken down and reconstituted into something new.
To the right of the fountain hang two screen prints onto canvas: Gravity Above, 2024, and Gravity Below, 2024. Wax from lit candles splashes like water against the laws of physics. Images of candles behaving strangely are repeated in several works throughout the exhibition in what one assumes are AI hallucinations. But shaded in halftone dots and screen-printed onto canvas, the materiality of an original work of art is restored, printed by hand, resisting the ages of digital and even mechanical reproduction.

There is far more to Contos’ work than just her use of AI—but in a world where it is increasingly difficult to encounter something genuinely new in art, there is an extraordinary beauty in what Contos has created. Like Dorothy pulling back the curtain at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Contos demystifies generative AI, presenting it in human terms as just another tool at the artist’s disposal. For now—and we can only hope for at least a while longer—the artist has the better of the machine.

This article was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69

EXHIBITION
Sarah Contos: Eye Lash Horizon
27 September – 24 November 2024
UNSW Galleries, Sydney