Underground Flower

archivee

fire lily 1

ivy

even more.... old old old old old {2017 - 2019} soloshow + proto-soloshow works!!... "physical re-posting"

blah blah in SHOGGOTH! [2020]
SOLOSHOW: Almost a decade ago, around 2012, dawsonscreek.info posted an image macro reading the following in all caps over an indistinct photograph:
IMAGES ARE WORTHLESS. MARKET VALUE IS ABOUT SCARCITY AND IMAGES ARE NOT SCARCE. ENDLESS SCREENS, EAGER TO DISPLAY WHATEVER ENDLESS CONTENT. (...) TOUCH SCREENS TENDERLY SWIPED. THIS IS MEMORABLE: THE SWIPE ITSELF.
This expresses two primary truths of our historical moment: the fact of overabundance levelling traditional forms of value, and the aesthetic seeping out from the work (maybe surpassing it entirely), bleeding into the oils between my finger and the screen, re-congealing as an image experienced asynchronously on thousands of private screens with millions of possible contexts, access points, and virtual meanings. Likewise, the value of standard institutional curation has altered as complex forms of image sorting and parsing have become entirely commonplace; we create, collect, index, archive, and process images in highly nuanced ways.

The gallery becomes redundant. Reciprocity is established between our environments and the visual conventions we absorb through documentation; we earmark certain kinds of lighting or iconography as “belonging” to platform-specific micro-aesthetics, anomalous materials become mediums which require sometimes banal, sometimes beautiful spaces as backdrops. Rituals are established: hauling around a messy folder of printouts to find the perfect room to place them in; performing alchemy with personal tokens from the sentimental to the post-sincere. Curating becomes a responsive form of material perception and social interfacing.

The intention of all production, here, is ultimately revelatory – showing our stuff, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes antagonistically. Nights spent alone downloading and manipulating audio files, sewing a garment to capture in the mirror, sneaking into buildings to photograph a painting; to post it online; to be experienced by other artists - also usually in isolation at the moment of beholding. This unity is often ambiguous, unregulated and organically emerging from the multiple, sticky, gossamer intersections of our individual paths and the visual forms we adopt to interpret them.

Solo Show speaks to this sense of unified isolation; this strangely hermetic social practise of being deeply and ethereally connected in a network while also being in solitude. At the moment, many galleries are rushing to update their practise and respond to isolation – Solo Show stands as a meeting-point for the many solitudes which have long underscored contemporary aesthetics. The works are created as rituals of spatial intimacy; their destiny is to exist as images: the ecstatically exiled offspring of a damaged, but endlessly proliferating, world.