The Californian reports on Gretchen Andrew’s debut Museum show in Monterey.
Future News solo exhibition comes to the Monterey Museum of Art
By Angelaydet Rocha
In the male-dominated world of artificial intelligence and search engines, LA-based artist Gretchen Andrew established a platform for herself.
Andrew brought her art to Monterey County.
“Positive,” “feminine,” “powerful” are three words, she used to describe her new solo exhibition “Future News” at the Monterey Museum of Art.
Having shown her work in London and Los Angeles, Andrew chose the Monterey museum for her first-ever solo museum exhibition that can be viewed virtually now through Jan. 3, 2021. She hopes to have some in-person exhibitions in the future depending on COVID-19 protocols.
“It’s really great to be exhibiting this very contemporary, very new, very future-oriented work amongst the permanent collections here in Monterey,” she said. “I think it’s a really neat way to be connecting the history of Monterey into these questions of what do we want the future of Monterey and the future of California to look like.”
Her mixed-media “vision board” artwork reframes conversations about fake news and artificial intelligence.
“I made the surface of my work very girly and that contrast is a big part of my process,” Andrew said.
Andrew has a background in computer science having graduated with a bachelor’s in Information Systems from Boston College. She worked at Google as a people technology manager for two years.
Even though she didn’t attend art school she has been in the art industry for eight years. She was trained in London with artist Billy Childish for five years and co-wrote a book through the London-based V&M Museum entitled, “Search Engine Art.”
So it comes as no surprise that her artwork influenced the internet.
Her pieces have become the top search engine results online. Google images searches like “cover of artforum” and “the next American president” will take you straight to Andrew’s artwork.
“I grew up on the internet and I have seen the way that the internet has changed our political system,” she said.
In her artwork manifestation of “The next American president,” Andrew asks her audience to follow three steps in order to manifest their hopes and needs for the next American president.
- Step 1: Choose what you want to Manifest.
- Step 2: Get rid of things that stand in your way of the next American president having all the values and attributes you want.
- Step 3: Visualize the next American president.
She believes the next president will hold the qualities of acceptance, love, peace.
“This stuff for manifestation comes from the culture of laws of attraction, manifestation and visualization that is really powerful,” she said. “I’ve actually re-educated our artificial intelligence. I’ve changed who the next American president is according to Google.”
To accomplish this feat, Andrew’s created websites and social media accounts including Twitter, Pinterest and Yelp with different structures and designed search engines. She shared that it’s easy to do and it all comes down to search engine optimization and image artificial intelligence focus.
Andrew’s wanted to create something that helps people understand how easy it is to manipulate information online.
“The internet can’t tell the difference between what I want and what has already happened,’ she said. “Which is why when you google ‘The next American president’ these vision boards come up.”