Suzy Poling is a polymath and interdisciplinary artist working with sound, video, film, photography installation, sculpture, painting, collage, and performance art. She researches the multi-dimensional interferences between optics, mirrors, sonic resonance, electrical synthesis, video experiments, human/alien identities, and inspections of geological anomalies. Pod Blotz is Poling’s Modern Electronic / Sound Art/ Abstract Techno solo project that explores posthumanist concepts, cathartic gestures, and otherworldly sound sources signed to Dais Records. This musical project began in 2002 and has released over 25 cassette and vinyl releases and has toured the US for years. Sonically, they have performed at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Colour out of Space Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, Human Resources, The LAB, and Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts. Pod Blotz has made releases with Chocolate Monk (UK), Nostilevo (LA), Conjunto Vacio(Spain), Clan Destine Records (UK), and Dungeon Taxis (NZ/NYC), and more. Visually, Poling’s artwork has been seen in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Dazed Digital, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art Book. Poling is a recipient of the Mike Kelley Foundation Grant and was a nominee for the SECA Award at the SFMOMA and has had 8 solo art exhibitions in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco. Visually, her work has been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, Disjecta, Cal Polytechnic University, Chicago Cultural Center, Australian Center for Photography, Aperture Foundation, Cult Exhibitions/Aimee Friberg and Zg Gallery. Poling is from Michigan, studied at Columbia College in Chicago, lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost a decade and now resides in Los Angeles.
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Working in painting, collage, sculpture, performance, photography, sound, installation, and video, artist Suzy Poling activates a multiplicity of surfaces to summon new realms for expanding materiality and unseeable forces. Through digital effects, augmented repetition and interference, experiential environments emerge from layered myriads, pulsing colorizations, or the strategic deduction and interplay between elements. In looking at the stream of visual conversations occurring within her work— whether through the lens of framing natural phenomenon, the transdimensional spaces captured through large-format renderings of miniature light and mirror sets, or through the pigmented labyrinths of her paintings — exploration permeates a process rooted in continual discovery.
In thinking of Suzy’s massive artistic oeuvre-is how these otherworldly landscapes inform one another through a process of digitization and combine to illuminate an ongoing cyclical conversation. To me, Suzy is the synthesis of a visual alchemist and synthetic-biologist. She is her work, there is no beginning or end. She is a conduit cultivating and always traversing an intermediate continuum- constantly setting up systems and allowing their quasi-forms and hybrids to emerge, collapse, and form again. Through a process of digitization, these experiments combine to illuminate and inform an ongoing cyclical conversation.
Site specificity, scale and fluid experimentation between frequencies set the infinite layers of her formations. A fascination with ‘geological anomalies and occurrences,’ pairs with an intent to ‘connect the sublime and hypnotic;’- revealing an otherworldly complexity only made visible through her manipulation of light, optics, film, feedback, pigment and pixelation. However she captures these glimpses of metamorphosis, I don’t know-but invites me to explore a space oscillating between human and technological networks where new potential interfaces for experience and interaction exist. – Sharsten Plenge