Articles
Nancy Baker Cahill Challenges the Limits of Perception Seeing the World Anew
In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works articulating her long-standing interests in questions of physical embodiment. She made real drawings with real materials—like carbon, pigment and paper—stuff you can get your hands on. So, it was a bit of a surprise she had moved into using complicated state-of-the-art technology, leaving the “meat space” for a virtual tabula rasa. “Sometimes people get motion sickness. So let me know...
A Conversation with Casey Kauffmann Hot Girl Sh*t
Casey Kauffmann is a hoarder of cyber content. Her image archive is a black hole of digital debris, infinitely consuming, tearing apart, and spitting out images—a spaghettification of visual culture. Kauffmann is known for her digital collages that populate her Instagram page, @uncannysfvalley. These assemblages are strange, fragmented manipulations of a visual language that Kauffmann continuously rearranges and reimagines. A manic hyper-femininity runs through her work, combining asses, baby animals, and the latest photoshop filter to disorient and warp popular significations of women. Her digital practice also informs her drawing...
Tabita Rezaire and the Materiality of The Digital COMPLEX INTERACTION
The digital is an arbitrary category. In everyday speech, it is sometimes used as an opposition to the material: a digital copy, artwork or exhibition versus a material one. The digital is presented as something existing outside of the material realm and the history and politics thereof; an apolitical utopia that does not hold the same accountability as the “real world.” However, the line between the digital and the so-called real is constantly blurred if it ever existed in the first place. “Our wireless life is very much wired,” as Guinea-based artist Tabita Rezaire points out in her video work Deep Down Tidal (2017), in which she explores...
It’s All About Meme
A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme reflects the biases of its creator and subsequent co-creator. Memes in their analog form were first identified in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who confirmed that the primary component of meme-culture is the creative act of remixing and sharing memes with others. Applied online, this makes the customization of memes a facile method for social commentary and...
Travels in the Midwest Musing on Art and Architecture
A couple of months ago I took short trips to Phoenix and Denver for a change of scenery, to indulge in culture, and to see the rebranding of Sheraton hotels. Denver is a surprisingly interesting city, and we stayed in the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, which is very well located near the main street of Denver, 16th Street, with its free streetcar, and near the Capitol with its famous “mile-high” status. Denver was founded as part of the gold rush, the one that occurred at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Historian Tom Noel has said, “Denver is such an unlikely place for a city to be. It began as a little town in the middle of nowhere,...
