ReLensing

bitforms gallery is pleased to present _ReLensing_, a solo exhibition by Jennifer & Kevin McCoy. The show brings together sculpture, video, and installation to examine how vision is mediated by the tools and machines built to reproduce it. The title points to the many instruments through which seeing is constructed and reconstructed, from the optics of glass and cameras to shadows and machine-learning models. The McCoys' longstanding engagement with cinema extends beyond the moving image itself to the systems, technologies, and physical conditions through which film is produced and experienced. Their earlier works examine these processes at different scales, from miniature sets and models to video installations. The _Crystal Films_ series continues this inquiry through Gilles Deleuze's concept of the "crystal-image" in _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_. For Deleuze, the crystal-image emerges when present experience and preserved memory become inseparable, allowing multiple states to occupy the same image.The sculptural glass forms in _Crystal Films_ are produced through 3D printing and mounted directly over screens looping fragments from Orson Welles's film, _The Lady from Shanghai_. Suspended between glass and screen, the moving image is refracted, recalling an earlier cinematic era in which projection was inseparable from the physical arrangement of glass and light. A subtle choreography links each video to its sculptural form. Where _Crystal Films_ refracts cinema through sculptural lenses, _Lens Organic_ turns the act of looking inward, collapsing the form of the eye with what the eye sees. In the suite of black-and-white video a forest warps into a sphere, hovering against a shifting backdrop of filmed landscape. The image joins the familiarity of nature with the restless movement of a camera passing through it, transforming vision into something both unstable and mediated. The McCoys' interest in the mechanics of perception takes an analog approach in _Ghost Ship_. While film and video often conceal their mechanisms in order to sustain an illusion, the apparatus behind this work remains fully visible. Ordinary objects, shadow, and light collaborate to produce a moving apparition in real space. By exposing how the effect is made, the work gives equal emphasis to the image and to the physical process that produces it. The relationship between image-making and its underlying systems takes a different form in _Depth Model_, a large-scale acrylic painting produced with a custom-built plotter. The work's point of departure is a passage from Herman Melville's _Moby-Dick_ that has long resonated with the artists as an instance of ekphrasis—the literary description of a visual artwork. Stable Diffusion was prompted to produce images of whaling ships, including interpretations of Melville's fictional vessel, the Pequod, which were subsequently translated by the plotter into painting. The machine's software reflects a parallel investigation into Neo-Expressionism, drawing on a dataset developed from art-historical sources. _Depth Model_ brings together literary description, machine-generated imagery, and the gestural vocabulary of painting into a single material surface. Together, the works in _ReLensing_ trace a continuous line through Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's practice, from cinema and optical illusion to sculpture and painting. Across these varied forms, the artists repeatedly expose the structures through which images are made. Rather than treating technology as an invisible tool, they bring its mechanisms into view, revealing perception itself as a process of translation and reconstruction.