presented in conjunction with

DIAGENESIS

Brian Bartz and Kelley O’Leary

April 18th to June 13th, 2026

An exhibition of video and kinetic sculpture that combines the work of two artists, Brian Bartz and Kelley O’Leary, to produce an alien landscape, de-familiarizing the technologies that permeate our world and opening them up to novel consideration beyond their current exploitative ends

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Patrick R. Crowley is associate curator of European art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Brian Bartz is an interdisciplinary sculptor and educator living and working in Berkeley, CA. He completed an MFA in art practice at UC Berkeley in 2020, and received a BA in fine art from Reed College in 2017. His work has been shown across the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, Well Well Projects, Pallas Gallery, Soldes Gallery, and more. He is currently an adjunct professor in art and design at the University of San Francisco. Through his work, he seeks to defamiliarize our relationship with technology, often by making electronic sculptures with functions that are speculative, useless, poetic, or simply for their own sake. More recently, he has been particularly captivated by the aesthetics of communication technologies such as radio and satellites, and the ways they interact across landscape and place. Some of the research interests which animate his work include depictions of terraforming in science fiction, the present day effects of cold war militarization, and, more recently, the relationship between technology, mysticism, and the cosmos. 

Kelley O’Leary is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across imagemaking, sculpture, video, and installation, she explores the relationships between networked technologies, cosmic matter, and the sacred. Her work is rooted in an inquiry into invisible systems, both technological and natural, that shape meaning making. Her research draws from a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary sources, integrating scientific, speculative, and mythological perspectives with sensory fieldwork and material inquiry. Through these methods, she seeks to better understand human existence within the hypermediated present as a fleeting point in the vast arc of human and geological time. Kelley received her MFA from the University of California, Davis where she was awarded the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the LeShelle and Gary May Purchase Prize. She is co-curator of Living Room Light Exchange, a new media art salon based in the San Francisco Bay Area.