Image: Microscope Gallery, New York
Microscope Gallery will open Faith Holland’s 'Scribble Scrabble Slop' on July 16, presenting the artist’s second solo exhibition with the New York gallery. The show runs through August 22 and includes an opening reception on Thursday, July 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. According to the gallery’s announcement, the exhibition brings together a new animated video, 3D sculptures, digital prints, and interactive wallpaper works.
The project centers on Holland’s attempt to teach AI models to draw in the manner of a young toddler. To do so, she retrained them on a homemade dataset built from scans of hundreds of early drawings, or “scribble scrabbles,” made by her child, Hildegard Holland Watter, between the ages of one and three. Microscope says the exhibition uses that process to expose scribbling as a blind spot in AI systems, revealing limitations, bias, and knowledge gaps in technology that increasingly shapes visual culture.
One of the key works is 'Green (Before the Word),' a 2026 single-channel video running 1 hour and 40 minutes. In it, Holland engages ChatGPT in a 100-minute conversation, shares scans of Hildy’s pictures, and prompts the model to produce its own toddler-like “free-wheeling joyous drawings.” The screen recording is accompanied by voiceovers from Holland and an AI-generated impersonation of Sam Altman in the role of the chatbot. The gallery says the exchange moves through hallucinations and attempts at scribbling before ChatGPT ultimately points to its own programming as the source of its failures.
Other works extend the same inquiry across different media. The exhibition includes image-to-image outputs from models such as Runway AI, which were trained on the databases of the child’s drawings and became source material for animated imagery and other works in the show. The title of a second video, 'The Twenty Basic Scribbles,' is borrowed from childhood scholar Rhoda Kellogg, whose research collected and analyzed more than a million children’s drawings. The piece begins with a blank page and gradually accumulates hand-like scribbles into a single collaged composition, while digital traces such as line quality, pressure, and textures signal its computational origin.
Holland also turns the results of AI training into sculptural form. In the series 'Scribble Scrabbles,' the artist isolates AI markings from Runway AI images and runs them through multiple AI processes to create hanging 3D-printed sculptures, which are then hand-colored with markers by Hildy in any manner she chooses. Microscope describes that collaboration as part of the work’s effort to rethink how machine learning images are made and how physical media can be misread or flattened by digital systems.
The exhibition’s largest participatory element is 'Up to its Limits,' a large-scale interactive vinyl wallpaper installation covered in AI-generated scribbles and left open for viewers to add their own drawings to the empty white spaces. Holland’s practice, as presented here, links video, print, sculpture, and installation to a single question about how AI interprets marks made by a child and what it cannot understand about human drawing. Microscope Gallery is at 527 W. 29th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, and the exhibition remains on view until August 22.
