Toeing the line of artist and curator, I started Gallery Institute — a contemporary arts organization — as an extension of my practice. Gallery Institute looks and feels like a real art institution through it's slick website and high-resolution documentation, and performs as a sort-of idealized art institution by paying its artists, offering full transparency, and being driven by it's goal to help artists realize their largest and most expansive dreams.

For the first solo exhibition, I walked artist Mahsa R. Fard through a series of workshops to translate a body of physical work into a purely digital, interactive solo-exhibition, Dream Simulator. Dream Simulator is made up of only two "real" paintings. Fard photographed the two “real” paintings as she worked on each layer, and the resulting documented layers are treated and presented as completed paintings in the sprawling digital exhibition. I built the website for Gallery Institute, as well as the interactive exhibition for Fard’s show. Fard completed the physical paintings, while I conceptualized and built the final “installation” of the artist’s work by photoshopping (or, digitally inserting) the images into museum spaces. While the work is all real, it only exists as digitally rendered documentation images of one huge imagined exhibition. I also created the lobby documented in this video, where viewers can generate a nearly infinite amount of new paintings using an Artificial Intelligence I trained using the paintings from the exhibition. Created out of only two "real" paintings, Dream Simulator offers a deep and vast exploration of the history and the future legacy that lies in every image.

The full project can be found at www.gallery.institute