Angela Washko
Through December 3 - Third Party at CTRL+SHFT. In a Silicon Valley in which women are vastly under-represented (and often grossly underestimated), curator Tanya Gayer's group show is a breath of fresh ionized air. She has brought together artists who are not only technically proficient — Rhonda Holberton's device that cuts cell phone usability within a certain radius is also a sculpture of minimalist beauty — but also approach today's technological landscape with a keen feminist eye. I loved Angela Washko's video piece Womanhouse (Or: How To Be A Virtuous Woman) Free Will Mode #3 that chronicles various sadistic scenarios from The Sims evoking modern anxiety. Likewise Lark Buckingham's brilliant film Tattle-Tale Heart imagines the complexity of a near future in which our wearables reveal our unedited feelings direct to social media, a gamification of emotion. Contemporary marketers are keen to track our every movement online or off in the interest of trying to generate more capitalist consumption, but these artists insist we are far more than the sum of our data points.
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