Semipermiable
Chad Eby

Artist Statement:  The idea of “semipermeable” is that which lets some things in and keeps others out. It’s an idea that has literally been in our face these past couple of years but is as ancient as gates, mazes and shibboleths. These days the concept is often connected to the functioning of the cells that make up our bodies.

For me, semipermeable also relates to the fraught boundaries between real and virtual, digital and analog, map and territory. What do we let in? What can we keep out? Stranger questions are right behind: what must be created or destroyed to permit a crossing? What might be a condition of in-between? Which side are we on?
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The work here is built at the borders, as much of our world now is, of material and data pushed and pulled across an ever-more-porous threshold.


Artist Bio:  Chad Eby creates work, by turns stark and whimsical, that explores humanity's fraught relationship with made objects and technological processes. Eby is a Lexington Kentucky-based multidisciplinary artist, designer and educator working with light, sound, and code to engage with the grain of digital technologies. Part of the faculty of University of Kentucky's School of Art and Visual Studies (SA/VS) since 2019, Eby previously served at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (the Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm, and Florida State University in Tallahassee. Chad's work has been shown at the Tekniska Museet (the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology) in Stockholm, Sweden, Generative Art XXII in Rome, Italy, New Media Fest in Valencia, Spain, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, TAG at the University of Western Florida, the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper, Studio 300 Biennale at Transylvania University, and various local venues across the United States. He has attended competitive residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Elsewhere, and was selected for the inaugural Space Art Summer School hosted at by Russian Museum of Cosmonautics.