The exhibition Replace the Sky with a Dramatic Sunset borrows its name from a widely used generative-AI prompt. Precisely because the phrase is so common, it reflects a broader cultural moment, a Zeitgeist: a small, everyday spell for an editable hyperreality.
The duo exhibition, created in collaboration with artist Sue Beyer, offers a playful observation of what we call “real.”
In Hyporeality, Liat Segal presents six large paintings produced by a custom-built painting machine. Each begins as a personal image taken by the artist. The image then goes through digital and analog processes that introduce randomness and abstraction. The works are framed with deliberately tacky gold - an intentional overstatement that flirts with fake glamour and the aesthetics of power.
In the installation Replace the Sky with a Dramatic Sunset, Segal takes this logic into material fracture. Tempered-glass shards cover the floor, holding remnants of an image. The process starts with an AI-generated “selfie,” created in response to a prompt describing a woman similar to the artist, followed by the familiar instruction to replace the sky with a dramatic sunset. The image is then painted onto tempered glass by Segal’s machine. During installation, the glass is broken into small pieces and left on the gallery floor. This same cycle - generate, paint, shatter, and randomize - also unfolds in an accompanying video, where the act of making is inseparable from its undoing.
