I'm happy to be included in Offline, a group show with a wonderful group of artists curated by Sarah G Sharp. Artists include: Beth Letain, Carolyn Lambert, Martha Clippinger, Molly Dilworth, Parsley Steinweiss, Sarah G. Sharp, Stacie Johnson. Read the press release below:
In the 2012 ArtForum article “Whatever Happened to Digital Art?” Claire Bishop described what she sees as a lack of critical response within the artworld to the digital era: “Why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution? While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital?” OFFLINE proposes that part of this “invisible” response to the overwhelm of information, access, images and mutable identities that come with life lived on the internet and mediated through a screen, includes a re-envisioning and invocation of the very thing the digital era suggests we leave behind: the “real.” The show presents seven artists who respond to these contemporary “upheavals” by reframing the mundane, concrete material of their lived experience in light of contemporary metaphors like rhizomatic relationships, the recombinant, virtual reality and the network. Without nostalgically fetishizing the analog or relying on anti-technology rhetoric, these artists use familiar forms like abstract painting, sculpture, performance and photography to re-imagine our new everyday in concrete terms and provoke altered perceptual readings of our “offline” experiences. We are reminded that our concrete experiences and identities are both re-framed by and persist alongside our online “lives.”
Stacie Johnson’s tightly designed paintings play with our perceptions of illusionistic space. Smooth surfaces, precisely rendered shapes and hand-made gradients reference the hyper-real while subtle shifts between painted surface and the wall challenge our perception of space, flatness and illusion. In her Photo Objects Parsley Steinweiss also investigates perception, illusion and surface. By combining photographic reproductions of various textures with “real” materials Steinweiss’s images force us to flip between an easy recognition of familiar objects and the sense of the uncanny that surrounds digital production methods.