KAWS. Flight Time, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 84 x 72 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Newcomb Art Museum.

Even across the diverse styles and interests of these three artists, linkages between content and craft are revealed. Weaving through the galleries, the succession of images feels like a series of slaps to the face as colors are taken to their saturation points and figures are monumentalized in scale and proportion. The dialogues composed by the careful placement of works provide the most powerful moments in the exhibition. KAWS’ deep black Michelin-like figure CHUM (2009) stands determinedly next to graphic paintings by Gokita, offering his protection to the naked and faceless vulnerables posed in the images, while ACCOMPLICE (2010)—a matte black toy bunny sculpture with large Xs covering his eyes—stands hunched in defeat across the room, out of sync with the bright canvases that surround him. Using the well-worn ethics of Pop Art to tease out the dark structures of commodity forms, KAWS’s sculptures allow these humorously irreverent figures to fester in their slick, expensive aura of pomposity and compelling iconicity.

A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita, 2015; installation view, Newcomb Art Museum. Courtesy of the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans.

Karl Wirsum’s oeuvre provides the strongest art-historical foundations for KAWS. An early member of the Chicago-based 1960s collective the Hairy Who (which later morphed into the Chicago Imagist Group), Wirsum’s works speak widely to the canon of modern artists who privilege experimentation and transgression over cohesive style, and who used popular culture as if the boundaries between high and low had never existed. Works such as Yodel Me Back to Orville Overhaul (1998) extends the vocabulary that Wirsum began in the 1970s, which combined motifs from graphic illustration and comics with hard-edged geometric patterns and designs that spoke to the flat horizontality of Color Field Painting as well as the intricate patterns and rhythms of Latin American and Oceanic folk art. Organic shapes are blasted apart by bright, unnatural tones of hot pink and acid green, while forms that reveal Wirsum’s education in the vocabulary of modern abstraction are disengaged from the history of oil painting through the smooth, manufactured qualities of the painted surface. Like KAWS, Wirsum brings a certain elegance and sophistication to bear on the eclectic references that appear in each picture by keeping his mockery of the art establishment as powerful and present as his acknowledgement of the past.

Karl Wirsum. Yodel Me Back to Orville Overhaul, 1998; acrylic on canvas; 57.5 x 44.5 in. Courtesy of KAWS and the Newcomb Art Museum.

However, it is the selection of nine portraits by the Japanese artist and educator Tomoo Gokita that lends this exhibition the most weight. While stark tonalities reveal Gokita’s investment in graphic illustration and portrait photography, the thick and expressive gestures that contour Gokita’s figures reveal the expressive pleasure of painting, tying him less to Pop and more to the Neo-Expressionist painters of the 1980s and ’90s (Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter come to mind). However, Gokita’s works fail to seize the historical and political scope of this history; in fact, it seems determinedly left out. The destruction brought to a work like Speechless (2013)—the scraped and gouged surfaces punctured by the blanked-out faces of unidentifiable persons—is disturbed more by the buffed gradations and soft, whimsical applications of paint than the frustrated violence brought to bear on the pictures. Instead of reaffirming the playful and potent history of popular culture that embeds itself within contemporary art, Gokita’s works point to the empty, meaningless forms of derivativeness that haunt KAWS’s practice. Perhaps in collecting Gokita, KAWS is engaging in a tautological form of critical engagement?

Tomoo Gokita. Speechless, 2013; acrylic gouache on canvas; 28 x 12. 5 x 14 in. Courtesy of KAWS and the Newcomb Art Museum.

While the polished surfaces and slick graphic style of KAWS’s own work find their match in Karl Wirsum’s electrifying geometric forms and Tomoo Gokita’s bold black-and-white bodies, it is the extraordinary level of refinement and craft explored within different materials and processes that confirms KAWS’s role as a 21st-century connoisseur of the highest order.

A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita is on view at the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University in New Orleans through January 3, 2016.

AnnieLaurie Erickson. Google Data Center, Surveillance Cameras, Mayes County, OK, 2014; archival pigment print; 40 x 56 in. Courtesy of AnnieLaurie Erickson and Tulane University. Photo: AnnieLaurie Erickson.

Only last year, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has been monitoring communications including email, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social-networking information. While the Arab Spring exemplified how social media could diffuse power, Snowden demonstrated that collecting huge swaths of data permits the government to monitor—and potentially control—social movements. Erickson’s photographs reveal the sites where that information is stored. Pigment print Google Data Center, Surveillance Cameras, Mayes County, OK (2014) depicts a massive white complex behind a chain-link fence. One lone light shines high above the industrial buildings. Throughout Erickson’s Data Center series, fences interrupt the onlooker’s view, a reminder that the majority of us are outside the periphery of control over our information.

AnnieLaurie Erickson. Local Server Series, 2014; installation view, Data Shadows, 2014. Courtesy of AnnieLaurie Erickson and Tulane University. Photo: AnnieLaurie Erickson.

Erickson’s title comes from security expert Bruce Schneier’s idea of “data shadows,” or digital extensions of our identities that we create when we use sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Erickson’s series Local Server (2014) echoes this concept by presenting human-scale photo sculptures of data servers interspersed with real wires and LED lights. The largest of these works stand eight feet tall and float out from the wall, hovering as if they are about to walk away. An etched mirror hangs behind each photo sculpture, questioning the objectivity of the image. Erickson also manipulates the images in Photoshop, creating small changes in the photo’s perspective. Bundles of wires (photographed at Tulane’s own data center) weave through the photos of computer hardware, creating a labyrinthine effect. Small LED lights installed within the photos glow, warning that these works are active. It is as if emails sent months ago and long forgotten files joined together to form an imperfect twin of one’s self.

AnnieLaurie Erickson. Data Shadows, 2014; eye-tracker installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of AnnieLaurie Erickson and Tulane University. Photo: AnnieLaurie Erickson.

Eye-tracking devices, traditionally used by media companies to understand audience behavior, measure either the point of the gaze or the motion of an eye relative to the head. Data Shadows (2014), the titular installation, uses eye-tracker technology and tunnel-vision software to allow the viewer to explore the act of seeing. As the viewer looks into the monitor screen, an underlying image becomes apparent. The movement of the eyes on the screen is recorded and then projected into wormlike patterns on the wall behind the viewer. This technology reveals how one looks at a work of art. Staring at this monitor is like playing a video game, one that makes your eyes feel strained for hours afterward. The installation, in the context of this show, becomes a warning: If our eyes reveal our deepest thoughts and emotions, will eye-tracking technology allow companies to mine even more intimate information in the future?

AnnieLaurie Erickson. Data Shadows, 2014; installation view, Data Shadows, 2014. Courtesy of AnnieLaurie Erickson and Tulane University. Photo: AnnieLaurie Erickson.

Overall, Erickson’s prescient exhibit is a warning for our future. Daily internet activity creates an increasingly Frankenstein-like representation of our selves, which is then sold as a commodity to be analyzed and manipulated for purposes both sinister and benign. While Erickson underwent material surveillance to create this body of work, our knowledge of the work via your visit to this website today may be under a more furtive form of digital surveillance.

AnnieLaurie Erickson: Data Shadows is on view at Tulane University’s Carroll Gallery through October 8, 2014.