Shirley Shor Moti Hasson Appears on "The Celebrity Apprentice" Art Basel Miami: Scope Takes Things Outside

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Shor has caught the art world’s attention in recent years with her computer-generated conceptual works such as The Book O Life, a large-scale installation in which an indecipherable series of computer-animated black-and-white lines are projected on to an oversized book in the center of a pitch black room; and Becoming an Artist, a “self-portrait” which creates a hybrid image of the artist mixed with other facial profiles.

In the last year, her work has been included in major surveys at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and the Berkeley Art Museum as well as solo shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Rotterdam.

Shor’s latest exhibition, On the Fly, features the artist’s custom-designed software and LCD installations, as well as prints of her colorful graphic designs.

Approached at the exhibition’s opening, the artist said she did not have any formal training in computer programming—though she creates most of her works using the language of “C++” programming code and earned her MFA in conceptual information art from San Francisco State University.

“I learned it just from watching my friends,” Shor said. “My husband is a programmer, and he’s been doing it since he was 14.”

Shor also pointed to her family as the inspiration for some of her most engaging works. In the floor installation Landslide, which sits within a sandbox, an ever-changing mélange of flashing color pixels become affixed to one another on the mounds of a rising and falling surface—which ultimately evokes a topographical atlas and a sense of shifting international boundaries. Shor said the idea came to her as she watched her son innocently playing with a friend.

“I saw them playing in the sandbox and I realized that this is the first struggle between two people,” she said. “He is the inspiration for much of my work.”

On the Fly runs at Moti Hasson through May 27.