September 4 – December 20, 2025
Performance 1: September 4, 2025, 5:30 – 7:30 pm EST
Performance 2: November 5, 2025, 4:30 – 6:30 pm EST
Artist Conversation: November 5, 2025, 6:45 – 7:30 pm EST
Lance Weiler: Where There’s Smoke
Where There's Smoke installed in RLWindow
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Where There's Smoke installed in RLWindow
RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Where There’s Smoke, an interactive time-based media installation by artist and filmmaker Lance Weiler. On view in RLWindow, the exhibition features a multi-channel video collage made up of large scale glitch-based vignettes, animated text, and projections.
The sequence evolves over the duration of the exhibition, embedding personal narratives from both the artist and the viewers who engage with it. This participatory experience becomes both an unraveling of family history and reflection on life, memory, and loss.
Weiler places a prompt in RLWindow for viewers to submit text messages with their meditations on personal possessions that they would save from a fire, a cue that nods to the fragility of what we assume to be permanent. The text that is submitted by participants is then inscribed onto the blockchain. This digital archive of emotional remnants forms a decentralized, living memento. By including passersby into collaborative authorship of the experience, the artwork’s evolving story becomes a shared performance. Weiler’s digital narrative collages will mature, erode, and constantly evolve throughout the exhibition. Their core elements include photographs taken by the artist’s father; documents; physical artifacts; and glitch art, a practice that embraces digital or analog malfunctions as part of its aesthetic.
Lance Weiler
Lance Weiler, Where There’s Smoke, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
The project was born out of a series of conversations Weiler had with his dying father, Robert Weiler (1939-2018), a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer. His photos and camera equipment became intriguing clues that ignited Weiler’s curiosity, hinging on the artist’s tragic yet mysterious encounters with fire throughout his lifetime.
Lance Weiler
Lance Weiler, Where There’s Smoke, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
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Lance Weiler
Lance Weiler, Where There’s Smoke, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
Utilizing glitch-based techniques and pixel manipulation, Weiler’s disparate storytelling elements harmonize into a personalized, time-bending presentation. Aptly, the glitch aesthetic visually mirrors the degradation of burnt objects. By embracing glitch art and recording its outputs with blockchain technology, Weiler complicates tensions around the digital age’s seeming permanence, versus its unpredictable pace of change.
During its run, the exhibition will feature two live performances by Weiler. Like a DJ of physical and digital artifacts, he will create live collages on a surface, captured via an overhead camera and simultaneously displayed in the window. Further contributing to the project’s continuous evolution, the performances illustrate Weiler’s blending of the physical and digital in real time as he patchworks stories into experiences that may endure – or may potentially fade into the smoke.
Where There’s Smoke’s blockchain integration is made possible thanks to a partnership with the Solana Foundation. The project leverages the affordances of the Solana blockchain.
Lance Weiler is a storyteller, emerging media artist, filmmaker, and thought leader. An alumnus of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Lance is recognized as a pioneer because of the way he mixes storytelling and technology. He is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University. Since 2013, Lance has been a Founding Member and Director of the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab.
Previous iterations of Where There’s Smoke include a premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and presentations at ArtYard, NJ (2023); Portland Art Museum, OR (2023); and Art Basel Miami Beach, FL (2024).
Where There's Smoke installed in RLWindow
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Where There's Smoke installed in RLWindow
