The Metaverse and How We’ll Build it Together, Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York, NY, 2022
For his second exhibition with Meredith Rosen Gallery, Triantafyllidis has created two live simulations, a series of aluminum wall-based works, and a sound installation which trace a thread from the banality of domestic environments to the radicalization pathways of the internet.
A family of Orks in a perpetual state of home confinement find themselves increasingly online. Meanwhile, two seemingly endless hordes clash into a violent free-for-all, swinging melee weapons. As waves of citizen militias and fantastical creatures enter the screen, warring bodies unravel slowly into a muddy landscape. The artist has built a series of ceramic devices, in collaboration with musician Holly Waxwing, which recite an opera for techno-optimism.
Triantafyllidis utilizes elements of the domestic environment, from decorative stoneware to gaming PCs, as a medium to expose both the sinister and docile ways in which virtual realities slowly reconfigure our lives and beliefs. While it is often the violent and climactic events which garner attention, Triantafyllidis sheds light on the pervasively mundane tracts we find ourselves on to alienation and polarization.