My work “Untitled (party light)” will be in this exhibition “this is our house / this is our rules / and we can’t stop” @ Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, from September 14 – October 14.
Opening reception Saturday September 14, 6-9pm.
More info:
this is our house / this is our rules / and we can’t stop
Jeff Donaldson | Holly Graves | Luca Leggero | Kevvy Metal | Zach Nader
SEPTEMBER 14 – OCTOBER 14
opening reception Saturday September 14, 6-9pmMicroscope Gallery is very pleased to launch its fourth year with this is our house / this is our rules / and we can’t stop, a group exhibition of five emerging artists whose varied practices intersect in their interest in electronic media from social networks and other technological platforms and devices. The photographic images, installations, and video on view from Jeff Donaldson, Holly Graves, Luca Leggero, Kevvy Metal, and Zach Nader each involve appropriated, manipulated, or hacked media transformed from the original content and purpose to underline and challenge notions of privacy, surveillance, ownership, and property in a wired-in world.
Zach Nader’s “family vacation” series – digital collage images derived from actual photos publicly posted by Flickr users and tagged as such – by its very existence emphasizes the loss of control implicit in the act of online sharing and draws attention to the potentially unlimited audience for our “personal” lives. Holly Graves takes an opposite approach, symbolically reclaiming her privacy and her home as a place of refuge in her “Home” series of photographic images made from screen shots captured through Google Street View of places where she has lived. While Kevvy Metal subtly combines custom animations from Google’s 3D Warehouse and altered internet porn with his own images in his animated video “U No U Wnt to Kiss ME” to present the home as a voyeuristic command center from which one is simultaneously and constantly both the observer and the observed.
In “MTPO PRG ROM,” Jeff Donaldson reminds us of the ultimately temporary nature of copyright and intellectual domain. The pattern knit on his 5 by 6 foot glitch textile work is the code comprising the program ROM data for the classic Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Luca Leggero’s “Untitled (Party Light)”, a light installation, offers the straightforward and direct. The smartphone playing a current app used by rave partygoers generating flashing colors is presented simply as art object.
Together the works raise questions about the changing nature of home and family, the costs of our desire for connection and instant access, and the blurring of the public and private realms. It is with this spirit that the title of the exhibition was chosen as actual lyrics of a current, and now notorious, pop song by Miley Cyrus.