John Gerrard

We don’t question where these things come from, they just appear, but Gerrard wants to confront all of that. He wants to unshroud the mysteries behind our Facebook feeds and push notifications.

In a strange reversal, Dust Storm makes our contemporary thirst for oil, and an attendant blindness to its effects on the world, animate a historic catastrophe in the panhandle of George W. Bush’s home state, a disaster that was likewise driven by oil, rapaciousness, and willful ignorance of the consequences.

In June 2015 it was announced that actor Leonardo DiCaprio planned to donate Solar Reserve to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was reported that DiCaprio's donation to LACMA was linked to his advocacy for environmental causes.

In 2015 Sow Farm was accessioned to the Tate Collection.

Recent solo presentations of Gerrard's work include "Exercise", Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2015), "Farm", Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2015), "Sow Farm", Rathole Gallery, Tokyo (2015), "Solar Reserve", Lincoln Centre, New York (2014), "The Surface of the World: Architecture and the Moving Image", Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Pasay, Philippines (2014), "Exercise (Djibouti) 2012", Screenspace, Melbourne (2014), "Exercise", Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul (2014), "Exercise", Simon Preston Gallery, New York (2013), "Exercise (Djibouti), 2012", Modern Art Oxford (2012), "John Gerrard", Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, Infinite Freedom Exercise, Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK (2011), John Gerrard, Ivory Press, Madrid, Spain (2011), John Gerrard, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia (2011), Universal, Void, Derry, N. Ireland (2011), John Gerrard, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, UK (2010), Cuban School, Simon Preston Gallery, New York (2010), Sow Farm : What You See is Where You're At, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (2010), Oil Stick Work, Art on the Underground, Canary Wharf Station, London, UK (2009 / 10), Directions : John Gerrard, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, US (2009), and John Gerrard, Animated Scene, 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2009).

In early 2014, following denial of access by Google, Gerrard hired a helicopter and produced a detailed photographic survey of one the key physical sites of the internet—a Google data farm in Oklahoma. This survey was the starting point of the work Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) 2015. The work features a simulated "twin" of the squat building flanked by diesel generators and powerful cooling towers, as seen from a virtual camera orbiting the facility. As suggested by the title, the architecture of the server farm bears marked resemblance to Gerrard's earlier works depicting livestock facilities, Grow Finish Unit and Sow Farm, Gerrard states that he wants the work to pose the following questions: "What does the internet look like? What are the material qualities of the network? How is it powered? Do we consume this facility—or does it consume us?"

Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014 features a simulated landscape showing computer-generated images of a solar thermal power plant in Nevada, whose central tower is surrounded by 10,000 mirrors which reflect sunlight onto it to heat salt to high temperatures, forming a thermal battery which is used to generate electricity. Over the course of a 365-day year, the work replicates the movements of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky as they would appear at the Nevada site. The mirrors adjust their positions in real time according to the position of the sun. Over a 24-hour period the virtual camera view of the tower shifts, following the movement of the mirrors, from ground level to an overhead satellite view.

Exercise (Dunhuang) 2014 originated in satellite images that were the object of online discussion and speculation during 2011. The images show a mysterious structure in the heart of the Chinese desert, a precise system of roadways the size of a small town and apparently designed to be seen from orbit. Gerrard commissioned an American satellite imaging firm to depth-scan these markings, and visited the site to document it photographically, in order to digitally reconstruct the entire structure and its surrounding landscape. Into this simulation, the artist places motion-captured simulacra of thirty-nine workers from a Ghangzhou computer manufacturing plant, clothed in the blue uniforms and elasticated paper bonnets they wear for their work.

Gerrard has participated in group shows including "The Space Where I Am", Blain Southern Gallery, London (2014), "The Everyday Experience", Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013–14), "Constructing the View", Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013), "The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things", Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK (2013), "Out of the Ordinary", Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2013–14), "0 to 60: The Experience of Time in Contemporary Art", North Carolina Museum of Art (2013), "Open File: Long Live the New Flesh", ICA, London (2013), "Pursuit of Perfection: The Politics of Sport", South London Gallery/Southwark Old Town Hall, London (2012), "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness", SITE, Santa Fe (2012–13), "Marking Time", Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (2012), "Visions Fugitives", Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, BEYOND at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia (2011), 20/20, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland (2011), EV+A, Limerick, Ireland, in collaboration with Peter Carroll. (2010), Infinitum at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, (2009), Academia at L’Ecole de Beaux-Arts, Paris (2008), Equal, That Is, To the Real Itself, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Existencias, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (2007).

[Gerrard's] fine balance of concept, content, and material suggest a theme and variations on the theme of the virtual. The computer-generated landscapes bring to mind, of course, virtual worlds, video games, special effects – that is, ways of producing unrealities. Here the format manifests something quite real, albeit at the periphery of most of our worlds – the discomfort of this admission is part of the work's impact – since for many of us, the arrival of food in our markets and the availability of oil are things we take on faith, if we think about them at all. Their existence remains provisional – more or less virtual – whether in life, on a gallery wall, or on a computer chip.

Gerrard's works are constructed as simulations or virtual worlds, using 3D Real-time computer graphics – a technology originally developed for military use, and now used extensively in the videogame industry (he currently uses Unigine 3D engine). Although making use of advanced digital technology, Gerrard's work has been noted for its resistance to being categorised as 'new media art'. Gerrard himself regards realtime 3D as 'a post-cinematic medium in which one can manipulate and interact with time in new ways'. He has also said that the works constitute a continuing reflection upon his own time: 'these melancholic realms are in some way a road movie of the Twentieth Century, a revisiting of the extraordinary comforts and freedoms that I've experienced.'

While they use the same software that is employed for intensively interactive gaming environments, the works offer the viewer no freedom of movement, and generally feature a slow camera path that orbits a silent, isolated scene. In relation to this movement, Gerrard says that his understanding of this medium is 'profoundly orbital. The works stage a world, in which certain set of behaviors have been put in motion. One of them is what I call an orbital camera, a camera that moves, at walking pace, around the scene – the human presence: being there, the witness. And then of course you have the orbit of the year which is linked to the real and which forbids an easy, instant consumption of the scene, because it takes a full year to unfold in full. But then, crucially, this world, this reality, consists of one moment in time. Not an instantaneous moment, but the time during which I documented the scene'

"Solar Reserve" was displayed on an artist-designed frameless LED wall on the Lincoln Center's Josie Robertson Plaza in New York in October–December 2014. Public response was favourable, with many visitors disseminating images of the work via Instagram (public images of "Solar Reserve" at Lincoln Centre).

Pulp Press (Kistefos) 2013 is situated in the grounds of the Kistefos-Museet Sculpture Park, the site of a nineteenth-century paper mill in Jevnaker, an hour north of Oslo, Norway.

In a recent series of works under the collective title Exercise Gerrard has addressed what James Der Derian has called the "military-industrial-media-entertainment network" – the convergence of media spectacle and military power, both operated through digital simulation technology. The work draws on sources such as the military simulation ARMA and the US army public media site dvidshub.

Oil Stick Work is the first work in which Gerrard integrated human figures into his portraits of architectural subjects. In Oil Stick Work, the character Angelo Martinez paints one square of his barn in oil stick crayon every day. It takes the whole day, from dawn till dusk, to complete this action. To complete the task will take the entire thirty years of the piece – from 2008 to 2038 (towards the end of the artist's own lifespan, as he notes in an interview.) Oil Stick Work was later shown for one full calendar year in Canary Wharf as part of Art on the Underground and has subsequently been exhibited in institutions globally.

Technology is the vehicle for this work, but it is not only the vehicle. Through it Gerrard manages to invoke the history of landscape painting, photography, and Earth art, and situates his work somewhere between documentary and fiction – between images that bring us news of places and situations that are foreign to us, and the kinds of invention (ideological, narrative, moral) that we undertake in order to comprehend them.

Exercise (Djibouti) 2012 is the result of Gerrard's Legacy Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, an alliance between Modern Art Oxford, Oxford University Sport and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, to mark the London 2012 Summer Olympics. The work draws parallels between the spectacle of troops being exhaustively put through their paces as the representatives of power, and the global, celebratory spectacle of the Olympic Games.

On a simulacrum of the barren Djibouti landscape, two teams of computer-generated figures, wearing red and blue, the traditional colours of war gaming, meet daily at dawn to initiate a series of cryptic gestural routines. The figures represent a group of elite athletes who were engaged for the project during their training for the 2012 London Olympics and whose actual movements were subsequently digitised using motion capture technologies. Exercise exists in 'real time' (Djibouti: GMT +3 hours), orbiting over a yearly cycle that also incorporates the movements of sun, moon and stars.

Upon the Exhibition of the work at Art Chicago in 2008, critic Alan Artner led his review of the Fair with the headline 'A New Medium Emerges', opining that 'Not many times in life can anyone see an artist pioneer a significant new medium. But that is what we see in John Gerrard's Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas)'. Artner continues:

Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas) 2008 depicts a pork production plant in the US midwest. Gerrard has stated that his visit to the Chinati Foundation at Marfa following the 2007 show Equal, That Is, To the Real Itself, and in particular seeing Donald Judd's 100 Untitled Works in Milled Aluminium, sensitised him to the recurrent forms of the pig production units he saw in the distance from the highway. Working with his partner Cesar Mejias Olmedo, he drove offroad to discover more about the structures, giving rise to Grow Finish Unit.

In 2006, Gerrard discovered several photographic images, from 1935, of a vast dust storm travelling across Texas, in what were becoming the agri-industrial heartlands of the US. The photograph became the basis for Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) 2007, a work that consists of a virtual portrait of the landscape as it stands today, upon which is placed a realtime animated 3D model of the storm, like a slowly unfolding sculpture. This work led Gerrard to investigate further the history of the Dust Bowl as a crucial moment of the modern industrial age.

Gerrard received a BFA from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. During this time he made his first experiments with 3D scanning as a form of sculptural photography. He undertook postgraduate studies at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College, Dublin, and in 2002 was awarded a Pépinières Residency at Ars Electronica, Linz, where he developed his first works in 3D Real-time computer graphics. In June 2009 he began a six-month guest residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. During 2012 he was Legacy Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, working on Exercise (Djibouti) 2012, a commission for Modern Art Oxford and the London 2012 Festival.

John Gerrard, (born 20 July 1974) is an Irish artist, working in Dublin and Vienna, best known for his sculptures, which typically take the form of digital simulations displayed using Real-time computer graphics.