Image: Microscope Gallery, New York
Microscope Gallery in New York will present an artist talk with Faith Holland in conversation with Brian Belott on August 6, bringing the gallery’s current focus on Holland’s solo exhibition, 'Scribble Scrabble Slop', into a public discussion format. The event is listed as the first program in Microscope’s new location and will be held in person at the gallery while also being live-streamed online at 7 pm ET. Admission is free.
The conversation is directly tied to 'Scribble Scrabble Slop', which runs at Microscope Gallery from July 16 to August 22, 2026. The exhibition is presented as Holland’s second solo show at the gallery and includes new animated video, 3D sculptures, digital prints and interactive wallpaper works. Across the installation, Holland attempts to train AI models to draw like a young toddler by using a homemade dataset built from scans of hundreds of early drawings made by her child, Hildegard Holland Watter, between the ages of one and three.
Microscope’s event listing says the talk will address questions raised by the works on view, including why AI cannot scribble like a child and whether there are better training methods than indiscriminate internet scraping. The gallery also notes that the discussion will touch on Rhoda Kellogg’s philosophy and work on child art, which Holland references in the new video 'The Twenty Basic Scribbles'. Belott is described as a longtime archivist of Kellogg’s vast collection of children’s art and the lead archivist of the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection.
The exhibition text frames Holland’s project as both technical experiment and critique. In 'Green (Before the Word)', Holland engages ChatGPT in a 100-minute conversation, sharing scans of Hildy’s pictures and prompting the system to generate toddler-like drawings. According to the gallery, the screen recording is accompanied by Holland’s voice and an AI-generated impersonation of Sam Altman, and the exchange eventually turns toward the system’s own programming as it explains failures in generating the desired marks. The works also include AI-derived imagery from image-to-image models such as Runway AI.
Other works in the show extend the same inquiry into material form. 'The Twenty Basic Scribbles' draws on Rhoda Kellogg’s research into children’s drawings and builds from a blank page toward a collaged composition. In the series 'Scribble Scrabbles', Holland turns AI markings into medium-sized hanging 3D-printed sculptures, then has them hand-colored with markers by Hildy. The gallery also highlights 'Up to its Limits', a large-scale interactive vinyl wallpaper work that invites visitors to add their own drawings to white spaces within a field of AI-generated scribbles.
Microscope’s description of Holland emphasizes her multimedia practice in sculpture, performance, video, animated gifs and net art, with a focus on gender, intimacy and technology. Belott’s work is presented in the gallery text as one that places dissimilar objects and found oddities alongside one another. Their public conversation on August 6 will bring those practices into dialogue at 7 pm ET, in person and via livestream, at Microscope Gallery.
