Emma Stern has always interested us, from our Radio Juxtapoz podcast with her and the magazine feature that followed, and in that interest has always been that she was creating a world for herself and her friends and didn't quite care if we got into it or not. She was making a world of painted avatars and gave us the simple proclamation that "Nothing is real." And in perfect harmony with this sort of multidimensional reality that Stern paints and has created, there is a gallery show, Down the Rabbit Hole, opening at Half Gallery in NYC, a show that fixates on the experience of traveling into the world of avatars and AI and the letting go of self to become a truer self. The press release is a story, a tale if you will, that begins:
Bonnie The Bunny needed to relax. She had time to kill, and she knew this intuitively. There
were no clocks inside The Rabbit Hole.
According to ‘You’re a Loser! Acceptance, Understanding, and Recovery for Gambling Addicts’
by Dr. Bill Bucksworth, casinos intend to “Create a suspension of time, facilitating an ideal space
for pleasure and reckless abandon.”
Gambling, as Walter Benjamin noted, “converts time into a narcotic”.
Inside a black hole, Time slows down dramatically.
Inside the Rabbit Hole, Time sneaks off to some faraway corner and nods out.
