Jack Barrett is pleased to present Into the Mist of Archetypes, London and Beijing-based artist Uchercie’s inaugural show with the gallery, and first solo presentation in New York. In this latest series of paintings, Uchercie considers the influence of technology on image-making, investigating the intersection of psychology, narrative construction, and generative artificial intelligence.

In a world where imagined places, people and objects can be instantaneously generated by the command of keywords and clicks, what becomes of human creativity? In exploring this question, Uchercie set out to understand how AI programs utilize and process language systems, and how their image libraries differ from human perception and memory. Her work seeks to uncover the formation of subjectivity and individual desire within a digital realm of syntactic homogeneity.

Placeless scenes of sharp shapes with shiny surfaces at once appear like cropped-in compositions of unrecognizable machines, and zoomed-out images of futuristic cityscapes. Her work can be seen as premonitions, warnings against the industrial haze that seems to color each of her paintings. Beautifully rendered visions of an industrial, dystopian future, Uchercie injects her paintings with swaths of pinks and purples, queering the male-dominated aesthetic of apocalyptic futures.

Viewed from various angles, the perspective warps and folds in on itself like a Klein bottle. The paintings are mindscapes of a collective consciousness uploaded and expressed in a digital space. The act of painting itself is a recognition mechanism, one that champions human perception above all.