This is the official blog invitation linking to the tweet that links to the facebook invite for my show opening tonight at Honey Ramka gallery. Please join me as we create conditions of artificial scarcity for the workmanlike PNG (and a GIF). (Plus, the installation looks good.)
Honey Ramka is an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn @ 56 Bogart Street (1st floor). Tonight's opening is 6-9 pm. Otherwise the gallery is open 1-6pm, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (and by appointment).
top to bottom, left to right:
sketch_m9, sketch_l2 (two layers) (detail), sketch_n1c, sketch_m7a, sketch_l6a, sketch_m3a
Printed on 100% rag paper
Below is the press release for the exhibition of Ana Weider-Blank (main space) and yrs truly (project space):
Honey Ramka is pleased to present Strange Friends, an exhibition by Ana Wieder-Blank. Strange Friends opens Friday, November 20th from 6-9 pm, and runs through Sunday, December 20th. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Wieder-Blank's raw, ebullient paintings and ceramics invoke mythic, protofeminist players—Lilith, Leda, La Loba—to enact terrible and heroic flashpoints of legend. Visionary and revisionist, searing and playful, Wieder-Blank "explore(s) the materials and content with a combination of dark humor, joy, and tragedy" to "change, distort, and extend narratives past their ends to create contemporary political allegories."
Also on view in the project space is Original PNGs, featuring work by Tom Moody.
A consummate digital draftsman and blogger, Moody paints polymorphous biomorphs and pens trenchant criticism with polymathic aplomb. Here, Moody's work evokes underground comix styles, graffiti, and modernist painting. Or, as described by the artist, Original PNGs is:
"A series of drawings made with open source paint applications and printed on paper. The software apps, with names like Chibi Paint, Krita, and MyPaint are often used for online fan art. Here I'm treating them as found processes with inherent virtues, limitations, and quirks to be explored. Made with a tablet and stylus, the drawings struggle between inherited notions of artistic dexterity and the default labor-saving functions built into software. In the frictionless world of 1s and 0s, what does it even mean to struggle? 'PNGs' in the title refers to the preferred output file format for these apps. The PNG is a lightly compressed image that can be read in any browser. Here, a collection of 'original PNGs' are preserved for gallery display. A recent animated GIF will also be on view."
Honey Ramka is an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn @ 56 Bogart Street (first floor). The gallery is open from 1-6 pm, Friday through Sunday (and by appointment). For more information, visit HoneyRamka.com.
On Thursday I visited Civic Hall, an office suite on Fifth Avenue that provides work space and WiFi for social activists. A friend rents space there ($250 per month). Civic Hall is funded by Google, Microsoft, and the dicey neoliberal outfit Omidyar Networks (as in eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, a would-be William Randolph Hearst of cyberspace). A skeptic might say Civic Hall is a form of digital greenwashing. "Sure we turn user data over to the government but look at us, we support activists!"
My friend suggested sitting in on a lunch workshop for Pictition, a start-up with an app that posts your photo when you sign a petition. Their example is Stop Elephant Slaughter -- who could argue with that? When you sign the petition, your phone snaps your pic and adds it to a big grid of friendly, concerned faces, from all walks of life, etc.
Most of the workshop attendees appeared to be professionals in Search Engine Optimization, User Experience, "social" and the like. One actual activist-minded person questioned the advisability of posting photos for say, a petition regarding battered spouses, where an enraged "ex" could use the photo as a stalking tool.
A developer of the app said "I think we need to separate questions of security from user experience -- we're here today to talk about UsEx."
At that point I chimed in with "you can't separate the two -- post-Snowden-revelations, people are concerned about where their facial data ends up, and this app assures its spread to a variety of political causes."
At this point one of the SEO types said "that's how your demographic feels but other demographics feel differently, so let's move on."
As the lunch was breaking up I meandered over to the table where she was sitting and said I found her use of "demographic" offensive and resented being pigeonholed with this meaningless word. She said "well, you said millennials and I was just saying there were other demographics." I replied that "I did not use the word 'millennials'" -- which is true, she just made that up.
Was too polite to say, on the subject of spreading your pic around the internet, there's the cautious demographic and the gullible-to-apathetic demographic.
