Nikki Leone’s “Rule Breaker” exhibit comes to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art to challenge preconceived notions of art, identity, and following — or breaking — tradition.
The exhibit, which features AI-generated pieces like a dog with grills, a “bi-racial” swirl ice cream cone and a vacuum cleaner decorated like a hot rod low-rider car, breaks down some of the barriers and rules that dictate customs of what makes something masculine motherly or more broadly, what makes something art.
“It’s my work, I can do what I want to do, and so I like to break the rules that have been given to me of what makes a good artist and a sophisticated studio practice,” Leone said.
Many of the themes come from Leone’s own wrestling with identity as an artist who is continuously venturing into new mediums of art, from sculpting, to rug-making, to now, AI-generated two-dimensional images.
The very nature of AI-generated art is rule-breaking. It was integral to the exhibit and added a new layer to its themes, but not without its own tension.
In working so closely with AI, Leone noted some of its many shortcomings – which has also shed light on some broader cultural ideas.
“AI is kind of a mirror of what our social paradigms are,” she said. “AI is only learning what’s on the whole interweb as of now.”
Sometimes, she said, this includes rigid ideas about gender, race and identity.
While this has sometimes been a hindrance — for example, many prompts involving feminine-adjacent verbiage automatically generate images in soft, pastel colors — it has also been a playground of assumptions and expectations ripe to be challenged.
Leone also acknowledged the rule-breaking nature of using AI for an art exhibit.
“There’s nothing illogical or superficial about the fear,” Leone said in regards to the anxieties surrounding the quickly-integrating but largely unregulated use of AI in creative works.
“There has to be some sort of adaptive process,” she said. “Ignoring it and saying, ‘That’s not right,’ is not going to make it go away … we’re going to have to learn how to deal with it.”
The inspiration for her rule-breaking ideas are also influenced by her own experience of “transitioning from being a sole person to a mother and a wife [and] finding that balance between being an artist and the titles that women … are required to take on,” Leone said.
“As females, we are kind of pushed into these things of having to choose.”
Leone recounted a conversation she overheard from university staff about the common practice of investing less into female artists because the assumption is that after kids, they stop working.
After becoming a mother herself, she had to find a way to incorporate her old and new roles into daily life, and not pigeonhole herself to one title, or even one medium of art.
“I’m still here, it’s just manifesting itself in a different way,” she said.
In reconciling the many differing aspects of her identity, Leone discovered “we don’t have to be ‘a thing’. We can break the rules.”
“None of us are the same as we were five or ten years ago,” she said.
She hopes the exploration of her own identity helps others “marinate in the idea of not knowing, and be okay with not knowing how to be.”
“There are many ways to live,” she said. “There are many ways to create.”
Nikki Leone’s Rule Breaker will be on display at the Virginia MOCA until January 5. More information is available at Virginia MOCA.
