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MODA
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
WILL WHARTON

by Mila Phelps Friedl

[Born in St. Paul Minnesota, Will Wharton is a new media artist living in Los Angeles. Wharton received his B.A. in Design/Media Arts at UCLA and he has exhibited his pieces at The UCLA Broad Art Center, The New Wright Gallery, Pauley Pavilion and various warehouses throughout Los Angeles]

In MoDA’s November showcase, “Unsolicited Airdrop,” Wharton was one of three artists who sold work to collectors. His piece Fossilized Film Reel No. 3, which sold for .8 Ethereum, ($3,174.20) was part of a series exploring the relationship between the natural world - a digital world of surreal digital ecosystems - with collector culture.

Inspired by the tradition of “Wunderkammer,” these cabinets of curiosity date back to the 1500s where collectors would display artifacts with roots in religion, history and the natural world. Wharton expressed how interesting it was that these collections blurred the lines between science and art often, representing a collector’s “worldly prestige.” An early precursor to modern museums, the tradition of “Wunderkammer,” most certainly has problematic roots in imperialism but Wharton’s work aims to explore “what types of artifacts, old film reels and organisms might be stored in [a] metaverse cabinet of curiosities. These digital organisms attempt to emulate how special conditions, like the creation of the blockchain/metaverse, can give rise to many rich, new and strange customs, communities, cycles and emergent cultures.”

For Fossilized Film Reel No. 3, a mesmerizing animation with pulsing, hieroglyphic-like creatures that meander across the screen, Wharton’s process involved form over function - creating the forms first, and then having the creatures dictate their own function. “I really liked the idea [of] showing the beautiful life of these organisms… this natural life cycle and then… there's like a point in the video where it seems like it changes… [and] the creature itself ends up being used for this like really mundane, sort of office task… I think there's a lot of humor… in the way we use resources or the way we exploit the natural world.”

With the use of VR controllers and a headset, Wharton sculpts, paints and creates his digital art in a 3D, simulated environment. “There's something to me just on a deeper, like, philosophical level that I really appreciate about this type of tool for 3D … it allows you … to bring in the nuance and the imperfection of the human kind of brush stroke or like…drawn lines. So it creates these, like much more organic and natural forms that are really hard to get and achieve if you were to just use traditional modeling techniques.”

Wharton was one of MoDA’s artists at this year’s Art Basel as part of The Temporal Gallery and The Wall at Factory Town. Two of his pieces from the featured series are still available for purchase and some of his more recent work will take a galactic journey as part of the Arch Mission Foundation, “a non-profit organization whose goal is to create multiple redundant repositories of human knowledge around the Solar System, including on Earth.” Several of his pieces will be nano-lithographed onto a disk and sent to the moon as part of an upcoming space mission. Earthside, Wharton is working with Yi, an “NFT Protocol for Digital private goods” that ensures only the buyer of a specific digital piece can view it - sharing it on viewable platforms, only if they choose. Yi’s mission emulates the exclusivity of fine art auctions where a buyer may choose to exhibit a particular art piece, in the sanctity of their private home.

In this new age of digital art, spaces and culture - artists like Wharton help to expand the audience’s understanding of the realms of creativity, the variations of artistic technique and what it truly means to own, collect and trade in digital NFTs. MoDA is excited to share these updates and to highlight Good_Boy_William as one of our artists.


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