Replace the Sky with a Dramatic Sunset
University of Wyoming, USA

with Liat Segal
curated by Brandon Gellis
Exhibition held in January 2026.

This exhibition brings together two artists who treat artificial intelligence not as a neutral tool, but as a collaborator, instigator, and unreliable narrator in the construction of contemporary selfhood. Through installation, performance, and computational image-making, their works probe how human identity, agency, and autonomy are rewritten when decision-making and storytelling are co-authored with opaque machine systems. The title "Replace the Sky with a Dramatic Sunset" evokes the familiar language of generative image prompts, in which a single phrase can overwrite an entire scene with a more spectacular, fictional version. In this exhibition, that phrase becomes a metaphor for how AI collaborates in the rewriting of reality and selfhood, substituting lived complexity with optimized, machine-shaped visions of who we are and how we should act.

“AI, autofiction, and the self”: Sue Beyer’s work uses AI’s tendency to hallucinate, misread, and invent as a method for autofiction, inviting the machine to speculate about the artist’s life and image. Embracing error and instability, these works stage the self as a distributed, relational construct, assembled across human memories, algorithmic guesses, and data traces that do not quite add up.

“Hyporeality”: In dialogue with this, Liat Segal’s installation places participants inside an AI-mediated task: assembling and reassembling an impossible mosaic of broken glass, following instructions generated by a machine system. The work exposes how bodies, attention, and labor are reorganized by algorithmic directives, foregrounding the uneasy line between assistance and command, optimization and coercion. Across the exhibition, AI appears less as an all-knowing intelligence and more as a flawed, speculative engine whose directives and hallucinations seep into how people move, choose, and narrate themselves. Identity and agency emerge as hybrid and unstable, shaped in the push and pull between human intention and machine-shaped goals.