THE SERPENT AND THE DRAGONFLY
Media Art by Mark Chavez & Ina Conradi
Now through July 5, 2025
Avenue 50 Studio
3714 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park, CA 90065
The Serpent and the Dragonfly is an immersive media art exhibition by Mark Chavez and Ina Conradi, featuring animated works and print installations that explore ancestral memory, symbolic perception, and speculative ritual through a decolonial and post-industrial lens. At its core is the interplay between the Vision Serpent and the Dragonfly—figures representing transformation, memory, and liminal perception.
Closing Reception:
Saturday, July 5, 2025 | 1–5 PM
Musical Performances by:
Live music by Magnolia and Qur’an Shaheed & Tate EC.
Free and open to the public
More info:
avenue50studio.org
giantmonster.co
I’m thrilled to invite you to our latest exhibition, The Serpent and the Dragonfly, now on view at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Running from June 7 to July 5, 2025, this show presents a selection of works shaped over years of living and creating in Southeast Asia—pieces previously projected across monumental LED screens in China and showcased at Ars Electronica’s Deep Space 8K Theater in Linz, Austria.
In 2005, I moved to Singapore to help launch the country’s first university art school at Nanyang Technological University. As a founding faculty member of the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM), I helped build an academic program where artists could not only teach but also innovate, producing new forms of knowledge through creative research.
My partner and collaborator, Ina Conradi, is a multidisciplinary media artist and Associate Professor at NTU. Her work spans experimental animation, immersive installations, and media architecture, combining art, science, and emerging technologies. Ina’s acclaimed films Chrysalis and Elysian Fields earned multiple international awards, including Lumiere Awards from the Advanced Imaging Society. Our more recent projects, such as Quantum LOGOS (Vision Serpent) and Morai, Thread of Life, focus design strategies with quantum science, and decolonial methodologies to visualize complex scientific ideas through poetic, immersive experiences.
In 2015, Ina and I co-founded Media Art Nexus (MAN), a 15×2 meter LED installation at NTU’s central campus hub. This platform evolved into a public-facing digital gallery, showcasing real-time generative media and audio-responsive artworks. I developed reactive visuals using TouchDesigner, while Ina pioneered one of the first courses in the region integrating AI art tools into creative curricula. Since launching in 2018, MAN has exhibited more than 1,000 works and partnered with institutions such as Ars Electronica, UCLA, and Public Art Lab Berlin, creating global opportunities for emerging artists.
Since then, our practice has reached new scales—screened across massive public displays in Asia, including a 170-meter-wide screen in Hangzhou viewed by over a million people daily. Quantum LOGOS (Vision Serpent) premiered at Ars Electronica’s Deep Space 8K, engaging audiences with mythic abstraction and generative code.
The Serpent and the Dragonfly marks a new chapter: bringing these research-driven works into a local, community-based space. This is our first time exhibiting in a neighborhood gallery, where the scale is smaller, the conversations are deeper, and the access is more personal. We’re excited—and a bit humbled—to share these installations with the Los Angeles community and to reflect on how these digital experiments, shaped in labs, theaters, and city plazas, might now resonate in a more intimate, human setting.
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