Backslash Artist 2024
Noah Feehan's working process resembles the scientific method, if you squint at it. But where the scientific method doggedly pursues a universal truth, his works flourish along stranger paths. Moving as needed across disciplines and media, he creates working products that are desirable but unsellable; sculptures that are immanent but largely invisible; and performances that address no audience.
When working in video, Feehan minimizes edits and post-production effects, instead using the form as forensic documentation of carefully-crafted situations, sculptures, or performances - proof the thing happened, and how it was when it did what it did. Addressing the viewer as a colleague, a peer and not a punter, affords him a rich mix of candor, rigor, and humor that he can't access otherwise.
In sculpture and installation, he strikes a careful balance between the thing-in-the-room and the historical, technical, and economic context that brought it there - the goal is to create an experience that rewards deep engagement, developing in the beholder's memory long after they've left the room.
Artwork in Progress
For Backslash, Feehan is exploring the technical and social state-of-the-art in autonomous flight. He will be making video works involving custom telemetry firmware and carefully-crafted "first-person view" drone missions that seduce the viewer, addressing them directly and implicating them in the artmaking process. The main work involves special modifications to the open-source flight control software, facilitating an unhinged, heedless performance mode: a perpetual "swoon routine" in which the devices fully lose control and freefall, recovering at the last possible moment before destruction.