NEW MEDIA CONTEMPORARY PRESENTS: V25:11 SCLPTR | OBSRVNG
OBSERVING A DIGITAL WAR FROM ACROSS CONTINENTS.
FEATURING:
MAC PIERCE
DAVID CHALLIER
KRISTEN COCHRAN
MAC PIERCE
Mac critically engages with weaponized emerging technologies, making artworks that examines topics that may otherwise fall into the shadows. Using technology as a medium to create artworks, his practice communicates concepts about computer hacking, surveillance, and firearms using the grammar inherent to these systems.
Mac received a BFA in Studio Art & Design from the University of Idaho and an MFA in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
KDR
2025
25” tall x 17” wide x 11” deep
OLED gaming monitor, acrylic, polished concrete, laser cut aluminum, vacuum formed ABS, 3D-printed ABS, modified monitor mount, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, stainless steel hardware, HDMI cable, USB-C Cable, 20v AC adapter, DC step-down converter, heat-set inserts, wiring, ghosts
Statement:
KDR (Kill Death Ratio) is a physical monument for virtual death. Combat within first person shooters presents death a central element of their operation. However, those deaths are only as a temporary setback. Every avatar can live an infinite number of lives given the player controlling them desires to return to the game, and thereby to combat. Winning these games is a matter destroying the opponents ability to meet the victory conditions, usually though killing their avatars in game.
The work takes the form of a gravestone made of modern materials with an embedded OLED gaming monitor. While the monitor is showing pure white, there is text visible on the display, a result of a single image being left on the monitor – causing burn-in.
The Effects of Celestial Mechanics upon Terrestrial Events
2025
~30” wide x 24” tall x 24” deep, install dimensions variable.
DJI Mini 3, Stick, 3D-printed ABS, fiber optic monofilament, Steam Deck™, found footage
Statement:
The broken drone in this piece was found crashed in downtown Chicago with its memory card intact. The video shown on the portable game console is from that memory card along with footage sourced from Ukrainian FPV drones. The two video sources, while taken across the world from each other, come from a similar machine that is controlled in the exact same way.
Untitled (army man)
A recreation of a toy found on the sidewalk, as it was found, scaled to the artists height.
2025 - 3D printed PETG, Loctite® 4070, Nylon threaded rod
65 x 48 x 18"
DAVID CHALLIER
David Challier (French, 1974 – Born in Grenoble and raised in the Alps Mountain) is an artist based between Dallas, Texas (USA) and Simiane-La-Rotonde, in the southern Alpes de Haute Provence (France). He currently serves as Invited Professor of Practice in Ceramics and Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Working across glass, ceramics, and technological assemblage, Challier creates works that oscillate between ancient artifact and futuristic relic. Drawing from geology, archaeology, architecture, and ancestral knowledge, his art investigates the fragile equilibrium between creation and erosion, nature and machine. His inspirations—rocky deserts, modernist design, mid-century architecture, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art—inform a practice rooted in transformation and metamorphosis.
His material research laboratory, based in a former decommissioned nuclear missile launching site in Simiane-La-Rotonde, provides both a physical and conceptual framework for his explorations. It is within this charged environment—once designed for destruction—that he conducts experiments in matter, energy, and rebirth.
Using rough materials collected from mountain and desert landscapes, Challier composes hybrid bodies that merge natural and industrial matter. In recent years, he has expanded his practice to incorporate machine guns, army devices, and computer components, reimagining them as archaeological traces of contemporary civilization. These technological relics become both instruments and symbols of human progress and decay.
Through cycles of fragmentation, recycling, and reconstruction, Challier’s works embody a profound tension between destruction and rebirth—sculptures that appear unearthed from a distant past or projected from a post-human future, standing at the intersection of geology, technology, and memory.
title: TENSFORMATION
size of each set : is 24 x 24 x 12 inch
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the cyclical and metamorphic processes that exist in geology, archaeology, and the organic world. Through these lenses, I question our perception of time—human and non-human, historical and universal—and how these different scales of existence intersect and collide.
When presenting my work, I aim to engage viewers in a reflection on the long- and short-term consequences of human action—on both ecological and societal levels. My installations, whether composed of single pieces, paired objects, or larger serial arrangements, invite a dialogue between material, space, and audience. The transformation of my objects into sculptures occurs in this exchange—when perception and presence merge.
Drawing from my artistic and scientific background, and grounded in ceramic research, I develop surfaces and structures that record their own formation. The cracks, tensions, and scars preserved within each piece become an intrinsic fourth dimension—a physical record of time’s passage and the forces that shaped it.
The tactile sensuality of the surfaces, the exposed “skins,” and the skeletal or structural layers within the forms are central to my language. The skin, as the boundary between interior and exterior, body and world, embodies the notion of the present moment—the threshold between existence and disappearance.
By working with ceramics and hybrid materials—often integrating technological or military fragments such as machine parts or digital components—I treat my sculptures as contemporary testimonial fossils. They stand as traces of our era’s material and ideological transformations, simultaneously fragile and enduring.
Ultimately, my work seeks to inhabit the tension between destruction and rebirth, between erosion and reconstruction—echoing the deep temporal rhythms of the Earth and the fleeting pulse of human civilization.
KRISTEN COCHRAN
Kristen Cochran is an artist living in Dallas, TX. Originally from Portland, OR, she moved to Texas to complete her MFA at Southern Methodist University (2010). In addition to exhibiting her work, she has been awarded residencies in NY, Austria and Wyoming and completed a year-long residency at The Center for Arts and Medicine at Baylor Hospital (2018). Ms. Cochran is a newly appointed Associate Professor in the school of Arts, Humanities and Technology at The University of Texas at Dallas and has taught extensively in the Dallas-Fort Worth community at local museums including The Nasher Sculpture Center, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and The Dallas Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include Life Support @PRPagency, fare well at The Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX, *work acquired), to sometimes disappear at the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Tender and Fierce (Artpace, San Antonio,TX) and chromasoma at Barry Whistler Gallery (Dallas, TX) among others (see CV). Ms. Cochran was recently awarded The Dozier Travel grant from The Dallas Museum of Art (2022) in support of her project Private Islands, an ongoing body of work she began in residence in Brooklyn in the Spring of 2021.
ARTIST Statement
Through sculpture, print, video and installation my practice points to the traces and residues of humans’ best efforts, the tragicomic nature of daily laboring and the passage of time. Socio-economic disparities, workplace politics and the relationship between basic needs and transcendent desires are embedded in the materials with which I work.
Fruitfulness and futility, making a living and being on the clock are conceptual interests related to human performance, identity, perceived value and access to resources. ‘Dreamtime’, bodycare and mental health are additional points of research that reflect my studies in anatomy, physiology and therapeutic massage.
These interests have materialized variously as ink blot ‘lounger’ paintings, suspended time chimes, island slideshows and sausage sculptures dangling in suspended states. My work is often site responsive and humor is used as a framework for more serious psycho-spiritual and socio-political concerns.