Controlled Oppositions
Rowe Galleries
September 19, 2025
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Current attempts to integrate the arts into the ideological system of the ruling party or the tech industry have eroded our faith in art as an independent, liberating force. But is this forced evolution of art intentionally perverse? Or, is it just a product of our time? In our desperate attempts to find “the Left’s Joe Rogan” and escape red tweets for blue skies, we accept that the revolution will be uploaded. But, on what platform?
Rather than deny art’s inevitable role in shaping both power and resistance, perhaps we should embrace it. In Controlled Oppositions, Clay Harper envisions a world where image-making is surrendered to generative AI’s stock footage libraries, allowing their inherent contradictions to unfold in tangles of physical and virtual space. By highlighting these friction points, he searches for a form of media that does more than simply rebrand existing modes of content consumption; it aims to render such modes obsolete.
About the Artist:
“I am a digital media artist that insists on experience,” he says. “I’m just really interested in making people remember that art is something that you have to see in person.”
As a digital media artist, Clay Harper works daily with bits and bytes and software and screens. So it may come as a surprise that at the core of his creative thought and practice is a critique of the virtual and an advocacy for the physical.
Harper is the first visiting artist-in-residence to inhabit the Sue Lemmond Helms Community Art House, a new space for artistic creation, education, and collaboration donated to UNC Charlotte for the College of Arts + Architecture.
Harper is in his second year teaching in the Dept of Art & Art History, where his courses have included basic animation, game design, video art, and animation production. While he helps students master the latest technologies, he also challenges them to consider their relationships to screens.