Tina Douglas

Trying to Touch the Grass

July 3rd – 25th, 2026  

Contemporary life is a condition of managed disorientation. We move through physical space while inhabiting digital ones, carrying in our pockets architectures of attention more total than any wall.

Trying to Touch the Grass takes its title from internet vernacular’s dismissive command — go outside, reconnect with reality — and asks why that has become so difficult, and what it costs us that it has.

The three works in this exhibition trace a genealogy of fragmentation: from the cut-up experiments of the 1960s counterculture, through the noise and violence of the early internet era, to the algorithmic feeds that now structure daily consciousness. They move through different registers — immersive installation, archival excavation, visceral accumulation — but share a single preoccupation: the slow erosion of the ground beneath perception.

What William Burroughs understood — that the cut-up doesn’t distort reality so much as reveal the cuts already there — feels newly urgent. The algorithmic feed is a cut-up engine, and we live inside it. The absurdity that once required effort to arrive at is now simply the ambient register of daily attention. The noise has not stopped. It has become the background. These works ask what it means to be imprisoned when the cell is one we carry in our pockets, when the bars are made of light and sound, and when we have forgotten what earth feels like beneath our feet. Tina Douglas 2026