California Dreamin' is a fantastic journey through California in five artworks. Five artistic glimpses revealing landscapes, characters and a whole imaginary world nourished by this region of the world.

From an artwork to the next, the manner changes, surreptitiously. Drawing, video, AI and photography follow one another and intertwine, blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is not, what is filmed and what is drawn, what stays still and what moves.

Does the power of digital art lie in its ability to manipulate our perception?

French AI artist If Only stunned the world by posting on social medias images of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, draped in a Christo and Jeanne-Claude style golden fabric. Fact or fiction? The images, created with Midjourney, were indeed the fruit of If Only's surreal imagination. They depict the artist's fantasy of grandeur, his desire for sensations, at the heart of the American dream.

Louis Dazy is a French photographer fascinated with California, where he often traveled. He's also passionate about Hollywood cinema, from film noir to David Lynch. California Haze crystallizes the seductions of the City of Angels, its nights, its women, its mystery… Literally turning you upside down! All the more given that this is no longer just a photograph. Louis Dazy goes beyond his original medium to add a few seconds of movement, the flicker of light, a soul to his image.

A Californian by adoption, Monique Wray gets up every morning in front of the ocean to practice yoga. Her portraits of women bear a striking resemblance to her: frank, plain, joyful, graceful. Her style is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau (a Côte d'Azur lover!), straight to the point, straight to the heart. With In Alignment, the illustrator and motion artist tells us that beauty comes above all from simplicity, and that truth is to be found within ourselves.

In Poisson Flingue [ “gun fish”], French illustrator Jean Houzard draws inspiration from the aesthetics of Japanese prints, even borrowing the fish from a drawing by Hokusai. The strange animal suspended in mid-air is matched by a gun, the two forms surprisingly looking alike. Jean Houzard's poetic and provocative work evokes the legitimacy of the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, which is the right to bear arms. America, and its ambiguities.

For Elki, Mexican video artist Rodrigo Courtney, aka Fangs, stages Californian performance artist Hanna-Katarina in a Nevada forest. The young woman plays an elk, an animal considered sacred by the Amerindians, even related to the human race: wamakaska ("inhabitant of the Earth"). By exploring native mythology, Rodrigo Courtney celebrates California as a wild and pure land.

These five artworks blending fantasy and reality paint an eclectic yet poetic portrait of California, what it symbolizes in the eyes of those who dream it, and of those who live it. A tribute to an extravagant, beautiful and bewitching Wild West that now has turned into a leader in the new technologies used by these very artists to create fascinating works.

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Curated by 1703 with Galerie DIAPO for UMANoïd Festival presented at 109, Center for Contemporary Cultures of the City of Nice, France. June 29th-July 13th 2024.

1703 is a digital art hub created by brand design agency 17mars. We make exhibitions and advise brands wishing to address their public through the prism of art.

www.1703.art