Jennifer & Kevin McCoy Crystal Films #5 (road) 2026 Glass, video (color, silent) 6 min 52 sec, loop 10 1/2 x 8 x 2 1/2 in / 26.7 x 20.3 x 6.3 cm
bitforms gallery presents ReLensing, a solo exhibition by media artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, on view from September 10 through October 10, 2026.
An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 10, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM, with regular gallery hours running Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
Bringing together sculpture, video, large-scale painting, and installation, the exhibition examines how visual perception is continually structured, translated, and reconstructed through physical optical instruments and algorithmic systems.
Throughout their collaborative practice, the McCoys have examined cinema beyond moving images, focusing on the technological and spatial conditions of film production.
In their Crystal Films series, the artists draw upon Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the "crystal-image"—where present experience and preserved memory occupy the same visual plane.
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy Crystal Films #2 (park) 2026 Glass, video (color, silent) 13 min 15 sec, loop 10 1/2 x 8 x 2 1/2 in / 26.7 x 20.3 x 6.3 cm
The works feature 3D-printed sculptural glass forms mounted over screens looping fragments from Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, refracting the footage to evoke early cinematic setups where light, glass, and projection were physically inseparable.
The exhibition expands its inquiry into optical mediation across several distinct bodies of work. In Lens Organic, a suite of black-and-white video works collapses the form of the eye with the viewed environment, warping filmed forest landscapes into floating spheres.
In Ghost Ship, the artists adopt an analog approach to optical illusion, exposing the light, shadow, and mechanical apparatus behind a moving spatial apparition rather than concealing the illusionary machinery.
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy Crystal Films #1 (ship) 2026 Glass, video (color, silent) 11 min 24 sec, loop 10 1/2 x 8 x 2 1/2 in / 26.7 x 20.3 x 6.3 cm
In Depth Model, a large-scale acrylic painting executed by a custom-built plotter, the McCoys bridge literature, generative artificial intelligence, and painting histories.
Inspired by the ekphrastic descriptions in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the artists prompted Stable Diffusion to generate images of whaling ships, which were subsequently interpreted by a plotter running software trained on a dataset of Neo-Expressionist painting vocabularies.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have exhibited internationally at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the British Film Institute.
Their work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Met, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Recognized as pioneers in computational art, their honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a Wired Rave Award, and a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award.
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy Crystal Films #3 (rotation) 2026 Glass, video (color, silent) 11 min 25 sec, loop 10 1/2 x 8 x 2 1/2 in / 26.7 x 20.3 x 6.3 cm
