Gallery Entry
Apple Pie
By Valerie Brunnette · US
"Apple Pie" is a generative artwork that considers our relationship with technology as well as the blurring of reality. It is from the series "While the World Burns," which places the rituals of leisure, wellness, fashion, and domestic life inside scenes of environmental instability and violence. Figures sip matcha beside a glacier, pose in rising water, and continue a game as flames consume the room. Their composure makes catastrophe feel strangely ordinary. The series explores selective awareness: how we recognize a crisis while allowing it to become the background to our lives. Drawing on the visual language of fashion photography and advertising, the images offer pastel color, coordinated clothing, and carefully arranged scenes. Humor and unease coexist. Familiar pleasures become entangled with danger, while the polished surface invites the same attention and desire that the work questions. Across the series, the pursuit of private comfort sits uneasily beside a world that cannot be kept outside the frame. Generative AI is an intentional part of this inquiry. Created amid anxiety about the technology and its consequences, the series uses its capacity for invention to construct impossible yet recognizable situations. This choice also holds a contradiction: a technology associated with uncertainty and an abundance of images becomes a means of examining distraction, consumption, and our desire for control. The work asks viewers to consider their own habits of attention. What do we normalize in order to carry on? When does seeking comfort become a way of looking away? A more conscious world begins here as a question of how we see, and what responsibilities follow from that awareness.