From 7 March to 14 April 2017 Claudia Hart presents a solo exhibition at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University. Titled Inside The Flower Matrix, the exhibition is a portal between The Flower Matrix, a virtual world designed by the artist for Oculus Rift and Vive platforms, and the real world.

Visitors to the exhibition can examine the quilts, ceramics and wallpaper designed and made by the artist; the decorative patterns on the surface of these objects are also augmented reality algorithms which allow visitors to jump into fields of digitally animated flowers spliced with graphics recognisable from the worlds of emoji and online advertising. Hart refers to the components of her assemblage as ‘craft objects’, each of which is a meeting point of multiple layers of information. Accompanying Hart’s material and visual investigations is a complex audio composed by Edmund Campion, the director of CNMAT – The Center for New Music and Audio Technology at the University of California-Berkeley.

In Hart’s Virtual Reality universe, the rational order is turned in on itself; the artist’s experiments with adapting and subverting normative technological and conceptual forms create an Alice in Wonderland world in which nothing is as it first appears. Hart has applied this fluidity of meaning and intention to spatiality and materiality as well as to narrative by creating a ‘virtual reality lounge’ in which architecture and information collide with mutating, revelatory results.

To open the exhibition, Claudia Hart will introduce her work with an illustrated presentation which takes place from 5-6pm on 7 March. The talk takes place in Art Building #133 at San Jose State University’s Main Campus, while the exhibition is held in the same building in room #127.

The Creative Programmer for Inside the Flower Matrix is Yan Zhou. The exhibition is also supported by Jeff Lubow, Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC-Berkeley.