Dream Logic and Digital Realities: AiR V at AOTM

AOTM’s Expanding Legacy

Now in its second year, AOTM’s Artists-in-Residence program (AiR) continues to evolve its mission to cultivate non-roster talent and deepen community-focused curatorial exchange. Rooted in the spirit of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century and its radical interweaving of gallery, salon, and cultural engine, the AiR initiative expands the definition of what a gallery can be—especially in a digital-first era.

AiR V, the second cohort of 2025, brings together three artists whose practices, though vastly different in form, converge around a shared curiosity: what happens when we unearth inner worlds through digital tools? This term’s residents are:

• mendezmendez
• Noper
• Olivia Pedigo

From textured collages to animated hallucinations to post-feminist interior dreamscapes, these artists reflect the possibilities of art made in the age of impermanence, overload, and rebirth.

mendezmendez: Where Surrealism Meets Consistency

Long known in digital collage circles for his seamless blending of classical painting with digital surrealism, mendezmendez entered AiR V with a refreshed practice: daily experimentation. No longer held hostage by perfectionism, the Spanish artist now finds depth through immediacy, creating works that feel both improvisational and iconographically dense.

“Lost My Mind”: A vortex of contradictions, the piece depicts a figure quite literally losing their head—but with tranquility, not panic. Merging antique anatomical sketches with 3D-rendered foliage and open skies, it evokes a psychedelic calm amidst chaos.

“Keeping It Together”: A baroque-meets-digital metaphor for composure under pressure. Limbs and objects drift in gravitational suspension as a central figure appears stitched together with divine threads. There’s humor and heartbreak in the metaphor: we keep it together, barely.

“Passing Through”: The only work in this cohort conceived as part of a larger series, this digital still is part 1 of a 6-part set titled Orbitas. It depicts a character slipping between dimensions—or selves—framed by elliptical cosmic forms. The full set will be available as a burn-redeem in mid-September, with a print for full collectors.

Unlike the other AiR V participants, mendezmendez works exclusively in static formats. Yet his pieces shimmer with a kinetic dream-logic, bridging collage traditions with digital fluidity and humor. He reminds us that surrealism never went away; it just downloaded new tools.

Noper: Emotive Chaos Rendered in Loop

Working in animated GIFs, Noper transforms introspection into a kind of glitched ecstasy. A hybrid creator, Noper uses AI and animation to make internal emotion visible—always flickering, always unresolved. He draws on childhood nostalgia, technological overload, and symbolism of the bull, the body, and the self dissolving into ether.

“try to be still”: A tender hallucination of overstimulation. The piece loops through a sequence where objects pulse, melt, and reform around a central figure trying to anchor themselves. It captures the millennial and Gen Z anxiety of needing calm in an age of relentless acceleration.

“pulled down but always floating up”: This work channels the strength and resilience of spirit. Horns become arrows, ascending through murky energy fields. It riffs on bullishness both literal and metaphorical: a refusal to sink even when tethered.

“constant energy” (Open Edition): Released as an accessible entry point, this animated loop explores rebirth, mutation, and the persistence of emotional motion. It suggests the digital soul never rests, only transforms.

Noper’s AiR V contribution reaffirms the animated GIF as not just a medium for memes or reaction images but a serious vehicle for emotional storytelling. His work is as much about affect as it is about movement—a swirling digital poetry of inner flux.

Olivia Pedigo: Interior Landscapes and Feminine Disguise

The only artist in AiR V working fully in 3D animation, Olivia Pedigo crafts surreal interior spaces that feel like simulations of memory. Her “bedroom scenes” and domestic dreamscapes interrogate the architecture of femininity, performance, and isolation in a networked world. Each piece feels like a screenshot from a dream—hyperreal, tender, and haunting.

• “recently deleted”: A visual meditation on self-erasure and the vulnerability of drafts. Pages pour into a digital trash bin, embodying the cycle of making, doubting, deleting, and trying again. It’s a quiet indictment of a culture that praises authenticity while punishing its mess.

“pretty blanket”: A beautiful, glittering contradiction. A figure is cocooned in a soft, shimmering blanket that comforts and suffocates simultaneously. The animation critiques the gendered expectation to soften oneself—with color, with decor, with demeanor.

“the watercooler” (Open Edition): A brilliant, looping allegory of remote work’s psychic drain. The titular object isn’t a literal workplace hub, but a digital echo of surveillance, social performance, and the collapse of boundaries between home and labor.

Pedigo’s work resonates deeply in our post-pandemic condition. Through moody lighting, ambient textures, and 3D choreography, she creates spaces where personal and cultural anxieties quietly stage themselves.

Conclusion: Three Visions of Digital Vulnerability

What unites AiR V’s three residents is not a style, but a sensibility: an embrace of art as a means to explore vulnerability in a digital age. From mendezmendez’s timeless symbolism, to Noper’s looping animations of chaos, to Olivia Pedigo’s deeply considered environments of performance and identity, each artist has brought forth a small world—singular and resonant.

The AiR V sale begins September 3rd, 2025, and will include both 1/1 auctions and a limited 24-hour open editions. These works will also be entered into the growing AOTM Collection, marking a permanent place in the archive of emerging digital creativity.

As digital art continues to evolve, AiR V stands as a vital snapshot: three practices, three visions, three futures. All asking, in their own way, what it means to make and be seen.