In To Feel What I Am, curators Eileen Isagon Skyers and Iris Williamson take a nuanced approach, cultivating works by artists working with various media to survey the power and failure of communication in a digital age.

people instead disconnects and alters human interaction. Many of the urgencies and demands placed on humans by technology begin to produce a sensation of guilt and failure–what becomes prevalent is the sheer quantity of circulation itself, rather than the content of any message being circulated.

To Feel What I Am explores how the constant dialogue between person and screen both reveals and conceals emotional vulnerabilities below the surface.

Hap has also released an accompanying publication, titled To Feel What I Am, as this month’s Hap Edition. The book includes essays written by Jesse Darling, Jessica Sage, Eileen Isagon Skyers, and Brooke Wendt and art by Zoë Burnett, Johnny Ray Alt, Darren Goins, Christina Humphreys, and Layet Johnson.

About the Artists

Zoë Burnett is a person making stuff about things on planet Earth. She was born in Cleveland Ohio but grew up on the internet. Her work explores our relationship with the digital world and has been featured on Vice, Rhizome, Wired, and The Creators Project. She has self-published two zines featuring her work, Hyperlink 2 My Heart and By Myselfie. Recently employed by Buzzfeed as a social web artist, she now lives in New York City with her cat.

Carlos Jiménez Cahua was born in Lima, Peru. He received his AB from Princeton University and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. His work has been included in recent exhibitions at Anastasia Photo (NYC), Torrance Shipman (Brooklyn, NY), the Mills Gallery (Boston, MA) and Open Space (Baltimore, MD) as well as was in the East Wing Biennial at the Courtauld institute of Art (London, UK). He is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Grant from the St. Botolph Club (Boston, MA). He is a co-founder of kijidome (Boston, MA) and is represented by Samsøn (Boston, MA).

Jennifer Chan is a video and new media artist who has been featured in Rhizome and ARTFORUM. She has exhibited worldwide, including Eyebeam (NYC), Future Gallery (Berlin), Museum of Moving Image (NYC), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Dresden Art Fair, Whitebox Art Center (NYC), ohmydays (Singapore), Eastern Bloc (Montreal), LTD (Los Angeles), Interstate Projects (NYC) and Moving Image Art Fair (London), among others. She received her MFA from Syracuse University in New York and is currently based in Chicago, IL.

Valerie Green received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and her BA from the University of California Los Angeles. She was in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and has exhibited at Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston, TX), Untitled Art Projects (Los Angeles), ACME gallery (Los Angeles), and California State University Long Beach. Green lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ivan LOZANO was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He has also been the programming director for the Cinematexas Experimental Film Festival, an arts blogger, co-founder of the feminist video collective AUSTIN VIDEO BEE, and an instructor at SAIC. He founded a PDF artist press, IMAGE FILE PRESS, dedicated to presenting artist books, zines, and other digital ephemera. His videos have been exhibited nationally and internationally and his work has been shown at the Texas Biennial (09,13), FotoFest’s Talent in Texas series (Houston, TX), The Sullivan Galleries at SAIC (Chicago, IL), Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), and Texas State University Galleries (San Marcos, TX). He lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Jesse McLean is a media artist whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, and is concerned with both the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring people together. She has presented her work at numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide. She was the recipient of a Jury Prize (First Prize) in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival, Zürich, Switzerland, received the Ghostly Award for Best Sound Design at the 2012 Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Overkill Award at the 2011 Images Festival and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival. She is currently living and working in Iowa City, IA.

Ian Swanson is an artist currently living in Brooklyn, NY. His primary focus is on four coordinated bodies of work: handheld digital scans; paintings of faces, hands and figurative scenes; works constructed while following youtube or other online tutorials; and replica esoteric ephemera such as orgone based products and rain barrels. Swanson has co-founded artist run galleries ORG in Detroit, and hotelart.us in NY. He currently operates objetosexual.info, a media label collaborating with visual artists and audio artists, and ego drift, a cooperative esoteric art and information store.

Tobias Zehntner, a Swiss and Danish artist, is an MFA Studio candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Zehntner received his BA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has had exhibitions and screenings around the world, including Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), LightWall (London) A-House Gallery (Kiev), Panteion University (Athens), Lauritz Kunsthal (Copenhagen), and Kornhaus (Berne, Switzerland). He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

About the Curators

Eileen Isagon Skyers has worked in contemporary art and non-profit arts organizations including the USF Contemporary Art Museum (Tampa, FL), The Wassaic Project (Brooklyn, NY), and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR). Her moving-image work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Littman Gallery (Portland, OR), Spielberg Theatre (LA), the International Streaming Festival for Audiovisual Art (The Hague, NL) and Superchief Gallery (NYC) among others. She holds a BA in Philosophy and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL and an MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.

Iris Williamson received her BFA from the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) and her MA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR). She co-founded and curated the alternative gallery Dugg Dugg (Charlotte, NC), and later enter:gallery (NYC). She curated exhibitions and arts events for the city of Charlotte during the Democratic National Convention in 2012. Williamson worked as Assistant Director at Freight + Volume Gallery (NYC) is currently Associate Director and Curator at Hap Gallery (Portland, OR) and Deputy Director of Camp45 Contemporary (Portland, OR).