It started with a tweet from Kanye West.

Amid a Twitter rant about then-wife Kim Kardashian, West, who legally changed his name to Ye in 2021, alleged that his family was trying to “lock me up with a doctor,” presumably over concerns about his mental health.

He also claimed that “NBC locked up Bill Cosby” and that “Everybody knows the movie [‘Get Out’] is about me.” The 2020 rant included a screenshot of a Google search where West had looked up “crichoues indignation,” a misspelling of “righteous indignation.”

For artist Caitlin Cherry, that memeable mistake became the jumping off point for her exhibition “Crichoues Indignation” later that year at The Hole gallery in New York City.

In an interview with 032c magazine, Cherry said that the show’s title represented both the miscommunication and autocorrection of someone who is constantly waging war against the industries he exists within. The phrase attracted her because it captured her state of mind in the months leading up to the show when she felt angry and took to Instagram to rant about racism.

Last month, Cherry’s exhibition “Eigengrau” opened at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Curated by former ICA director Dominic Asmall Willsdon, the new exhibition is a continuation of her work with “Crichoues Indignation” to explore the commodification of Black femme bodies as sexual assets in the social media age.

“She’s someone who’s very sensitive to and dialed in to what is happening in popular culture, including, in the case of this exhibition specifically, what’s happening within radically mediated social and digital exchanges — culture that defines our contemporary pop culture,” says Chase Westfall, interim director of the ICA at VCU.

“We are always subject to a much larger set of machinery that is giving us the illusion of autonomy in that [online] space,” Westfall says. “It’s always dictating how we’re going to experience what we’re going to experience.”

“Eigengrau” means “intrinsic gray” in German and refers to the dark gray color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. For Cherry, an assistant professor of painting and printmaking at VCU and founder of the online experimental art and theory program Dark Study, the title represents both the lack of perceptibility and the overwhelming access we have to images and information in the digital age.

In Cherry’s art, dancers, models, celebrities and influencers are represented in lurid ripples of color like the visual distortion that occurs when you press down on an LCD screen.

Westfall compares the subjects of Cherry’s work to Édouard Manet’s 1863 oil painting “Olympia.” That painting, which features a nude white prostitute looking back at the viewer as a Black maid attends to her, caused controversy when it was first exhibited. Though Parisian viewers of the time were well familiar with nudes, Manet’s representation of a prostitute in such a realistic fashion scandalized the art world.

Similarly, Cherry explores the tension between content creators feeling empowered in the digital space while also being subject to the whims of a consuming audience and the algorithms that drive web traffic.

“There is, for me, a nagging question as you move through the exhibit of who’s in charge,” Westfall says. “In the paintings themselves, the persons who are depicted are not depicted in a passive or disempowered way. Oftentimes they’re looking back at you, so they have a gaze which is just as strong or maybe stronger than your own. There’s this tension between who has agency in that space, who is the audience? Who is empowered within that exchange?”

The exhibition features an enormous box-like installation that houses some of the paintings. The piece represents both graphics cards in a render farm — a cluster of networked computers that process massive amounts of graphic data for visual effects in movies and video games — and rack storage systems that museums and private collectors use to store paintings when they aren’t on display.

“There’s this tension in thinking about these out of sight spaces,” Westfall explains. “These are sites where cultural capital is being accrued. Either it’s in the form of images that are being rendered in rendering farms, or in the form of paintings that are being traded and purchased and sometimes hoarded as commodities within a system of cultural economy.”

Visitors to “Eigengrau” will also encounter a giant spill of reflective vinyl that covers part of the floor and the sides of the render farm installation.

“As you move through the exhibit, you see yourself reflected back through these different materials, and I think that raises important questions about our role, our agency, our complicity in these systems … where commodification of human beings is happening,” Westfall says. “It speaks somewhat ominously to a digital ooze we’re all sort of caught up in that comes pouring out from places we don’t see, controlled by forces we don’t see.”

Though social media may feel like a passive experience to participants, Westfall says Cherry expresses the need to be more thoughtful in our online movements.

“We are always subject to a much larger set of machinery that is giving us the illusion of autonomy in that space,” he says. “It’s always dictating how we’re going to experience what we’re going to experience.”

Describing “Eigengrau” as “fun” and “surprising,” Westfall says the exhibition is unlike anything visitors have seen before.

“It’s very alluring,” he says. “There’s a sensory overload that happens in the space. There are all these visual phenomena and experiences that are going to make it really captivating and seductive for people. As they spend time in the space, they’ll also increasingly feel a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of estrangement that the scale of the objects induces.”

“Caitlin Cherry: Eigengrau,” runs through March 9, 2025, at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 601 W. Broad St. Free. For more information, visit icavcu.org or call (804) 828-2823.