Natasha Shirley’s In the Cybernetic Meadow borrows its name from Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (1968), which imagines a world where humans and machines coexist in peaceful harmony, echoing Isaiah 11:6, in which the wolf shall also dwell with the lamb. In today's age of rapid technological development, scientific advancements demystify the natural world and machines become the locus of the unknown, taking on a divine presence.

Internet users reproduce their interior lives as digital commodities, all while mass surveillance escalates. Through photography and multimedia sculpture, Shirley explores the increasingly indistinguishable boundaries between voluntary self-disclosure and external surveillance. Photographs taken from everyday life are overlaid with mirrored sigils, evoking contemporary rituals of self-documentation. The repetitive act of interlocking chainmail echoes the ritual of praying the rosary, the body becoming an instrument of mechanical devotion. The machine occupies a role once attributed to angels, vast reflectors imaging the universe as a whole in all its detail, watching over us all.

Opening Thursday, December 3rd and Friday, December 4th at 6PM at Flight Gallery, In the Cybernetic Meadow will be on view through the month of December during gallery hours:

Thursday-Friday 5-9PM
Saturday-Sunday 12-5PM