Hybrid Exhibitions as Performances of the Self
In Nail Art Museum, Canadian artist Jeremy Bailey makes the exhibition itself the performance — and himself the institution. Merging body, technology, and humor into an augmented reality museum that exists across mobile screens, streaming platforms, and live events.
Initiated and produced by Bailey in 2014, Nail Art Museum examines how artists can perform the structures of art institutions through digital media. Using augmented-reality overlays and body-tracking interfaces, Bailey transforms himself into a host of virtual artefacts that parody and critique the hierarchies of the contemporary art world. Viewers encounter him as curator, docent, digital sculpture, and product — all at once.
From Gesture to Augmentation
The project began as a series of live-streamed performances combining Leap Motion sensors, Max/MSP patches, and webcam overlays. Bailey’s hands — each adorned with virtual 3D models — became exhibition spaces in themselves, a playful inversion of the museum’s “white-glove” ideal. Early versions were presented at the ICA London and Impakt Festival Utrecht, where gestures animated sculptural AR artefacts projected in real time.
Since 2022, Nail Art Museum has evolved into mobile AR filters developed in Lens Studio, allowing users to re-perform the museum through their own devices. What began as an installation now operates as a distributed, open-ended exhibition spanning social media and app-store ecosystems.
Hybridity as Method
Within the Paik Replayed taxonomy, Nail Art Museum sits across several hybrid conditions at once — which itself reflects the work’s complexity. It is tagged EXE-HYB (hybrid exhibition combining physical and digital spaces into one shared experience), ARM-HYB (hybrid artwork merging material and virtual elements within a single piece), AUR-HYB (hybrid audience connecting in-person and online participants simultaneously), and EXA-AUG (exhibition analogy through augmentation — a digital layer that expands or transforms real space). The map visualizes these relations — performances, interfaces, infrastructures — as a network of connections between conception, mediation, and reception.
The Artist as Institution
Bailey’s long-term practice, often described as critical self-design, humorously reframes the aesthetics of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and art-world branding. In Nail Art Museum, this critique materializes as a museum embodied by the artist himself: a recursive loop where the individual becomes a distributed institution. By adopting the tools of AR and social media, Bailey performs the contradictions of digital self-exhibition — empowerment and commodification, access and surveillance, play and labor. His body becomes the site where curatorial authority, technological mediation, and artistic agency converge.
A Taxonomy of Hybrid Exhibitions
Mapping Nail Art Museum within Paik Replayed contributes to a broader investigation of digital and hybrid exhibition formats and their capacity to transform artistic, curatorial, and institutional roles. Through humor, embodiment, and open-source distribution, Bailey’s work echoes Nam June Paik’s early explorations of the artist as media interface. This case study shows how the taxonomy developed in Paik Replayed functions not only as a tool of classification but also as a notation system — capturing the performative choreography of hybrid exhibitions across time, space, and technology.
Reflections
Nail Art Museum exemplifies a generation of works that blur the boundaries between artwork, platform, and performance. Its evolution from experimental stream to open-source AR filter embodies the fluid temporality of digital culture — a museum without walls, but also without closure. As Bailey describes it, the project remains “a satirical take on online exhibitionism.” Beneath the humor lies a question central to contemporary art in the age of artificial intelligence: what happens when the artist, the artwork, and the audience all become interfaces within the same augmented system?
