As a virtual reality artist-run space (blessedly, no goggles are required) EPOCH is the quarantine-induced experimental project of its founder Peter Wu, an acclaimed artist whose own work has pushed the boundaries and applications of futuristic tech in fine art for years. Now as the gallery world movies increasingly online, a broadening and deepening appreciation of digitally native art gains traction, and projects like this are helping to show the way. For a gallery that intentionally exists exclusively in non-material form, EPOCH not only deals closely with architectural space and motion in its experiential structure, but its recent exhibition, “Fallen Monuments,” specifically prompts intimate engagement with the physical body as its subject.

The site’s adventurous design proceeds through the setting with hints of gaming aesthetics and procedures. In this case, a broken down palace, itself a majestic ruin, locates the show’s works throughout ancient stone chambers, unkempt conscourses, and a surrounding desolate landscape. Still and video images and 3D modeled objects are installed within the distorted perspectives of the “rooms” and click into large clear views. While they each address the presence of the body, several take the concept of the monument further as a literal starting point. Iván Argote’s Turista: Christopher Columbus, Columbus Circle, New York (2020) beckons as a high pop of color, which it turns out is the traditional textile in which the ersatz discoverer has been wrapped. The explicit reference to toppled empires in Gala Porras-Kim’s Fallen Monuments after Ozymandias yields a growing field of half-buried representations of recently dismantled statuary—figures whose statues are physically coming down all over the world.

Iván Argote’s Turista: Christopher Columbus, Columbus Circle, New York (2020)

In a collage by York Chang—the fractured portrait (Antagonistics, Legacy Portrait 1 (2013))—we witness the decomposition of patriarchal ancestry, its patronizing forms being reconfigured, deconstructed and violently obscured. Conrad Ruiz shows several works from his “Man on Fire” series, which are portraits of unrest; “man” a living, prescient metaphor. Ricardo Rivera’s Drawing Translations (2018) video in which his two hands enact a performative, ambidextrous, ritualistic abstraction is also very much about the actions of the artist and his physical presence in the frame as the mechanism of bringing energy into matter. Marton Robinson’s Tecnologías Decoloniales, Slot Machine (2020) takes on the physicality of the Black, male body in a simple but powerful motif that accesses both the individualism and the commodification of the body of color in American culture. Allana Clarke’s postcards to a little Black girl—herself or at least an energetic stand-in—are affirmational in the specific way in which we wish we could reach back in time and encourage ourselves to persist and to dream big. Some have been posted (with Love stamps) while more cards are yet to be written upon.

Closer to the uncanny than full realism, nevertheless the EPOCH effect, while not exactly an illusion, is seductive and holistic—the site makes a convincing place and the works look comfortable in its world, even if humans don’t quite fully belong yet.