Catherine Couturier Gallery is delighted to present our upcoming exhibition Not a cloud in the sky with gallery artist Rachel Phillips. Not a cloud in the sky interrogates the relationship between nature and technology, symbolically intertwined yet physically distinct. Phillips captures photographs of the clouds in the skies above well-hidden, windowless data centers powering cloud computing and AI applications; she applies pearlescent paint, and carefully creates a monoprint from ink sprayed directly onto delicate, discarded spider webs.

In our time, the motif of a web has been appropriated to describe the most ubiquitous technology of our lives: the world wide web. More than a mere tool, this endlessly refracting datascape has become an elemental realm we simultaneously inhabit alongside its source material, the terrestrial world. This echoing of the natural order to describe our unnatural one continues apace with the rise of artificial intelligence.

By remembering something of what the natural world is, we keep a hold of what our technology isn’t. For whatever power, possibility, and yes, even magic, our digital web might possess, it most certainty is not just a cloud in the sky.

(Rachel Phillips)