Clay Harper’s Generative AI Vision Intrigue At Rowe Galleries Of Charlotte
Thu, Aug 28, 2025 | 6pm to 8pm
The gallery reception at Rowe, Rowe Galleries
9119 University Road, Charlotte, NC 28223
Current attempts to integrate the arts into the ideological system of the ruling party or the tech industry have eroded our faith in art as an independent, liberating force. But is this forced evolution of art intentionally perverse? Or, is it just a product of our time? In our desperate attempts to find “the Left’s Joe Rogan” and escape red tweets for blue skies, we accept that the revolution will be uploaded. But, on what platform?
Rather than deny art’s inevitable role in shaping both power and resistance, perhaps we should embrace it. In Controlled Oppositions, Clay Harper envisions a world where image-making is surrendered to generative AI’s stock footage libraries, allowing their inherent contradictions to unfold in tangles of physical and virtual space. By highlighting these friction points, he searches for a form of media that does more than simply rebrand existing modes of content consumption; it aims to render such modes obsolete.
This exhibition will be on display August 28- October 4.