Featured Artist Chris Fox Gilson

Artist Chris Fox Gilson’s body of work focuses on the agony and ecstasy of disruption. Enjoy his humorous and engaging portfolio and visit his website to see more.

 

 

The genre of literature called “speculative fiction” poses engaging questions about how people would behave if we lived in a parallel world where other rules of physics or historical fact applied.

 

 

In my art, I ask the same sort of “what if” questions. I create an anachronistic world that holds time upside down and shakes familiar objects out of its pockets to land in unexpected places.

 

 

What if the Old Masters’ protagonists had our 21^st Century technology? Would they see it as friend or foe? What if the Renaissance couples in famous paintings had met on an online dating platform? What if Leonardo DaVinci invented generative AI? (There is a DaVinci AI program, after all.) Could it have been his secret gift to other artists—like Van Gogh, Dali, and Walt Disney—to create their own masterworks?

 

 

While laboring mightily as an ad agency partner, filmmaker, author of university textbooks, selling my fiction to Hollywood, and pioneering in virtual reality, I studied how technological disruption affects human behavior. Every innovation meant to connect us, entertain us, and give us greater control can also make us feel isolated, angry, and powerless.

 

 

Now in the age of AI, we’re pushing the boundaries of how a machine can think like we do. Meanwhile we’re worrying that our tool could become our Terminator.

 

 

We can look at disruptive change emotionally and see a threat. Or we can look at it imaginatively and make it uniquely ours. I collapse time in my art to remind us that humanity has seen it all before. The Old Masters’ protagonists endured endless wars and plagues. They struggled to adapt Medieval minds to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Yet they survived as the subjects of timeless art that continue to teach us about human resilience.

 

 

Although I may be Miami’s oldest living “emerging” artist, I’m extremely fortunate to have caught the eye of Fernando Fernandez, Gallerist and Curator, and Artsy Shark. It’s true that the unbranded artist may spend five percent of their time on creation, and the rest on becoming known.

 

 

But it can be just as much fun taking a creative approach to promotion in their hands. This former Mad Man applauds the quality of their training for artists who have no ad agency or body of marketing literature to help them navigate an often-frustrating profession.

 

Chris Fox Gilson invites you to follow him on Instagram, at MundoArteGallery and Singulart. 

 

 

Want to stay current on cutting edge business articles from Artsy Shark, plus artist features, and an invitation to the next Call for Artists? Click below to sign up for our twice-monthly email. You’ll get all this plus opportunities and special offers that you can’t get anywhere else!