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LAW WARSCHAW GALLERY is pleased to present a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Fernando Orellana (American, b. 1973, El Salvador). Bringing together three interrelated bodies of work, the exhibition explores Orellana’s sustained interest in visual art, technology, and quantum entanglement. Orellana’s Shadows series (2012–present) gave rise to electrospiritology™, a new term and curatorial framework coined by LWG director and curator Heather Everhart. This emerging field of inquiry considers the potentiality and consequences for machine mediumship between the living and the departed. In these works, Orellana’s ghost machines pair personal belongings of the deceased with custom-built technologies, creating poetic conditions for the departed to reengage with activities of their corporeal lives. Alongside Shadows are Orellana’s automatic drawings and fever paintings. Rooted in Surrealist and spiritualist traditions, the automatic drawings are created in a variety of locations, and—as an act of personal mediumship—connect the artist to his Mayan ancestral knowledge. Here, they are presented here as conceptual and compositional blueprints for Orellana’s ghost machines. His fever paintings were created while the artist was traveling in Italy; despite being vaccinated, he fell ill and was subsequently isolated during the Covid-19 pandemic. These works capture altered states of consciousness where memory, perception, and imagination intermingle, embodying Orellana’s dual entanglements: skeptical and spiritual, algorithmic and ancestral, analog and mechanical. His work plays both sides of the veil between absence and presence, memory and imagination—reminding us that even as tools evolve, our longing to connect and create endures.

From robots that hold protests, extruders that birth populations and machines that are designed for the dead to operate, Fernando Orellana has collaborated with automation for over twenty years to create transmedia artwork. As a machine designer, a technologist and a user, Orellana has blurred the line between himself and the machine in the creative process. The imagery and narrative that Orellana explores spans a spectrum that includes giving agency to automata, embraces the generatively made, celebrates the wonder of absurdity and is most often driven by the universes of his subconscious mind. 

Fernando Orellana’s work has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at regional, national and international venues, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Cultural Center of Spain, Espacio Buenos Aires, Everson Museum of Art, Fondación Telefónica Santiago, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Speed Museum, and Toledo Museum of Art. He has received awards, commissions, and residencies from Americans for the Arts, Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes and NY State Council on the Arts, Banff Centre, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Sage College, School of Visual Arts, Studios at MASS MoCA, Takt Kunstprojektraum Berlin, Three Rivers Arts Festival, Union College, Vermont Studio Center, and the Vilcek Foundation. Orellana earned a Master of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is Professor of Digital Arts in the Visual Arts Department at Union College in Schenectady, NY.