Elizabeth Riley's 'Ribbons Become Space' exhibition at SL Gallery transforms digital video into sculptural installations

Elizabeth Riley's exhibition 'Ribbons Become Space' ran from June 12 to August 9, 2019 at SL Gallery, located at 335 West 38th Street in New York City. The show featured a video created during Riley's residency in Reykjavik, which served as source material for the large installation 'The Dragons of Iceland' (2019). This free-standing sculpture incorporated six small video monitors playing excerpts from the original footage, three upended tables, and draped strips of video stills resembling patterned fabric. Two large wall reliefs, 'Structure of Light' (2019) and 'Configuring Video' (2019), were constructed from inkjet prints of processed video stills, with paper strips affixed to the wall in undulating curves. The video itself presented rapidly edited glimpses of the observable world transformed into fragmented, psychedelically colored sequences, featuring avatar-like forms manipulated by silhouetted hands. Later scenes showed a production line processing balls of yarn, suggesting themes of social control and women's roles. Riley's work explores the transmutation between digital and material realities, using technology as an expressive medium to examine the fungibility of virtual and physical categories. The exhibition demonstrated how video content could be deconstructed and rendered three-dimensionally, creating a multi-media theater set that invited audience interaction.