Altarpiece: Ascension is currently on view @gazelliarthouse till December as part of Subject to Change

Altarpiece: Ascension is currently on view @gazelliarthouse till December as part of Subject to Change.

Brendan Dawes’ Altarpiece: Ascension (2025) continues the artist’s series of triptychs that fuse the iconography of church altarpieces with contemporary reflections on AI. Building on Altarpiece: The Divinity, shown in February as part of Christie’s first AI auction in New York, Ascension addresses the sweeping rise of AI and its influence across every aspect of human life. The left panel imagines a utopian future of progress and harmony; the centre reintroduces the goddess figure from The Divinity, now assimilated with the machinery of AI; while the right panel warns of the chaos that might follow unchecked technological proliferation, populated with fleeing CEOs and “tech bros” in private planes and spaceships. Created through meticulously collaged images using the ComfyUI interface, the work’s golden and bronze tones, dramatic lighting, and layered “scenes within scenes” offer both grandeur and unease. As with earlier works, the triptych’s three panels also reference the architecture of modern computing as proposed by John von Neumann: input, processing, output.