Sarah Lasley
The Enclave
In this video work by artist Sarah Lasley, a fully-digital residential sanctuary inhabited by middle-class white women is infiltrated by online trolls and an encroaching computer virus. Taking the POV of a roving camera as it pans throughout the 3D animated world of The Enclave, we meet owner Moni Calvioni and her sister, Blair Elkins, as they’re immersed in a fundraising campaign to save their digital neighborhood. We learn that Calvioni has advertised the campaign on a website she refers to as “the Reddit” and, soon after, the neighborhood is menaced by escalating digital pranks, including crude graffiti, sexually explicit elements and gifs. Despite the fundraising campaign to defeat the computer virus, the boulders and mountains enveloping The Enclave grow like a cancer, and eventually the whole visual structure of this digital world is toppled, glitched, or corrupted.
The humorous narrative of this work centers on a plausible near-future, in which humans retreat into customized digital communities because they no longer feel a sense of belonging “IRL”. This work interrogates privilege and the pursuit of a utopian personal haven, while illustrating how the internet/metaverse—far from being an escape from society’s problems, conflicts, and histories—ends up concentrating and exacerbating them. Themes of colonialism, racism, and misogyny underscore the drama of competing actants in the Enclave, and at the end of the simulation there is no clear winner. The final scenes of fractured buttes superimposed onto the upturned suburb promise no resolution, and echo the contemporary refrain that our collective imagination can’t see past apocalypse.
To learn more about Sarah Lasley and her work visit:
@sarah_lasley on Instagram
For inquiries regarding The Enclave, please visit the artist website or email sarah.lasley@gmail.com
