Vampires and Wolf Men
Featuring Anna Fidler
Age-old folklore renders a vampire’s reflection invisible. Anna Fidler suggests that when a post-internet vampire faces the mirror, its simulacrum glitches like a psychedelic computer virus. The exhibition Vampires and Wolf Men combines Fidler’s traditional taste for exploring supernatural energies with a vampire’s taste for blood. She revamps portraits of suspicious looking individuals from the 19th and early 20th centuries, giving them the electric glow of one who has stolen life from another.
Fidler sources original photographs from the Oregon Historical Society and electrifies them with echoing landscapes of aura and energy. Their neon vibrations drip into one another like a lucid dream gone haywire. There are also signs of a data overload, with code-like imagery collapsing into a kaleidoscopic meltdown.
Although we have all seen our fair share of vampires and werewolves with the entertainment industry’s recent lust for bloodsuckers, we’ve never seen them like this. Fidler opens up a historical archive and infuses it with supernatural hallucinations that would make Dracula dizzy.