The Artist Is Absent

Esherick’s February 2026 solo show at Heft is a deep exploration into how technology stands to reshape the roles of authorship and authenticity in our society, both in art-making and beyond. What happens when technology can do everything that we can do, but “better”? What happens when it replaces us? What do we do then? Who do we become? Esherick is reckoning with these questions by living them out, training an AI model on his own work until it’s capable of replacing his practice, and then letting it do exactly that for one year. This model is now ready, and the period of his replacement will begin with the opening of this show. The focus is not the technological achievement of such a model, or even the art created by it, but instead on the one year performance of leaving the artist adrift. The prospect of
spending a year alienated from an artist’s practice and passion is invariably daunting, and this undertaking looks at how losing our sources of creativity, human meaning, and connection changes us. For this show, the last of Kevin’s human-conceived art-making for the coming year, two new bodies of work explore these same themes of artistry & authorship. The first, titled Homages, complicates the notion of homage with a collection of new works made using AI models that have been trained on some of Esherick’s favorite contemporary artists. Where Sturtevant used replication to explore the proliferation of images and the idea of the simulacrum, and Levine re-photographed canonical images to challenge constructs of authorship, Esherick is now working with today's tools to imagine the inevitable consequences on artistry of AI. This means not only the prospects of automation and alienation that it spells, but also its capacity for imagination and transcendence of human limitation. The series engages with the work of painters, photographers, and conceptual, digital, and performance artists alike in an almost devotional fashion, religiously replicating their styles while asking in the same breath what might happen when the most human elements of the art-making process have been made replicable.

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