User:Brettawallace/sandbox

Brett Wallace (born April 23, 1977) is an American conceptual artist in New York City. He is currently represented by ART 3 Gallery and has shown in the Dublin Biennial and This Friday or Next Friday Gallery.

High school
Wallace studied at Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts in 1993, which inspired him to pursue his early interests in art. A 1995 graduate of Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, Wallace was an avid hockey player, well-known for his speed on the ice. He was even named after Brett Hull, son of Bobby Hull, both professional hockey players. He hung up the skates after high school to focus on art. Wallace's early works were plein air landscapes, influenced by the Boston Expressionists, focused on ways of seeing and reacting to the landscape.

College
Wallace attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on a Chancellor's scholarship for artistic excellence. He graduated in 1999 after completing his thesis entitled, "The Struggle of Man Vs. Machine" which explored how technology was transforming communication, medicine, transportation. In this show, Wallace intertwined hand-drawn and painted images with electrical motors, pumps, turbines taken from nearby recycling centers and transformed into hybrid combines.

Professional career
Wallace started his career working at the Judi Rotenberg gallery and exhibiting his work in New England. He had several solo and two-person shows in greater Boston. In 2001, to continue to support his artistic practice as the dot-com bubble crashed, Wallace joined Forrester Research, a forward thinking technology research firm, where he would work for the next 9 years. While there, Wallace absorbed the depth and breadth of consumer technology and its impact on society. In 2008, he attend Harvard Business School and shortly thereafter joined a startup. This was a challenging time as the US then fell into financial crisis. In 2011, Wallace joined LinkedIn, relocating his young family to Silicon Valley where he was even more fully immersed in consumer networks. After three years of living in the valley, Wallace moved to New York City aka (Silicon Alley) and continues to build startups with LinkedIn/Microsoft.

Conversation Project
In 2014, he launched the Conversation Project. The Conversation Project is a series of interviews with influencers in the contemporary art world that examines connections between art, culture, and technology. Interviews include Massimiliano Gioni, John Yau and Michelle Grabner. Wallace's work and The Conversation Project was included in an essay in the book, "The Artist as Cultural Producer" edited by Sharon Louden, Published by Intellect Books (2017), Distributed by University of Chicago Press.

ART 3 Gallery
In 2016, Wallace opened his first solo exhibition in New York City entitled, "If This, Then What" at ART 3 Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. During the show, Amazing (a fictive company launched by Wallace) delivered first ever piece of art by drone, October 18th, 2016 (see press release). This show was reviewed in ArtCritical on November 14th, 2016. Wallace went on to have another solo exhibition shortly after entitled, "Reserved For Engineering" at This Friday or Next Friday Gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn. This show became the soft launch for Amazing Shipping.

Amazing Shipping
Wallace's recent venture is Amazing Shipping, part fictive startup and part ongoing conceptual artwork. Amazing Shipping, often referred to as simply Amazing, is a U.S. based creative production and distribution company with headquarters in New York City. Its vision is to spread compassion in times of technological change and uncertainty. Given the political and economic uncertainty, Amazing Shipping is a new kind of ideological startup.

New technologies, such as AI and 3D printing, are paving the road for a revolution that is changing how we work and live. The speed and scope of this revolution is unlike anything we have ever seen. It spans billions of connected people and the systems, institutions, ecologies and geographies we inhabit. With change of this magnitude, comes fear and anxiety. This revolution could further exacerbate the growing discontentment and fear of stagnation we saw in the recent US Presidential election. Workers will be displaced through automation. Income equality and the skills gap, where not enough people will be trained for the newly created, in-demand jobs, may grow even wider. And, human compassion could be eroded in a machinic world. At Amazing, we seek to shape a future where technologies create economic opportunity for billions of people and complement human creativity and compassion, rather than destroy it.