For his exhibition, “Sunflower Seed” at Team (Bungalow), Portland born, New York based artist/programmer Tabor Robak has created custom built PCs with high definition display screens on which generative abstractions morph constantly. Robak’s technical prowess creating hybrid environments using Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D and Unity has been celebrated in the gaming, advertising and art worlds. Though there are only four works on display at Team, each is a virtuoso achievement. Robak clearly indulges in the pleasure of looking and has choreographed a masterly and complex ballet of pixels.

Tabor Robak, Tidepool (2016), courtesy of the artist and team (bungalow).

Tidepool (all works 2016), a work that expands across three HD flat screens, as well as the single-screen works Junk Drawer (Platinum), Junk Drawer (Chrystal) and Skypad, displays infinitely changing animations in which arrays of colors, textures and shapes appear to defy gravity as they cascade across the compositions. What appears to be a sequence of random interactions and stunning juxtapositions on the screen are in fact due to Robak’s precisely programmed algorithms. The works are mesmerizing and almost impossible to walk away from. The “Sunflower Seed” pieces are a departure for Robak, whose past multi-screen works often featured recognizable objects, sci-fi landscapes and cityscapes that were a tribute to gaming culture. The new works are less didactic and more whimsical and meditative. In Tidepool, overlapping gestural bands of color whisk across the screen leaving traces of their shapes as they dissolve into translucent gradients, evoking both a seascape and mountainous landscape simultaneously.

Tabor Robak, Skypad (2016), courtesy of the artist and team (bungalow).

Junk Drawer (Platinum) and Junk Drawer (Chrystal) are fascinating tromp-l’oeil animations that could be best described as Piranesi/Escher-esque. Quasi-recognizable objects dart across geometric abstractions contained within a three-dimensional box perfectly rendered from every possible direction.

Tabor Robak, Junk Drawer (Platinum), 2016, courtesy of the artist and team (bungalow).

This box (or drawer) encloses what seems to be a bottomless pit of rising and falling water. Robak has imagined an ever changing junk drawer with an endless array of objects and allusions to the material world that majestically and albeit sinisterly appear and disappear ad infinitum.

Tabor Robak, Junk Drawer (Crystal), 2016, courtesy of the artist and team (bungalow).

Tabor Robak, “Sunflower Seed,” May 15 – June 26 at Team (Bungalow), 306 Winward Avenue, Venice, CA, www.teamgal.com