REDIRECT
January 24 – February 24, 2020
RAMP Gallery, 821 Riverside Drive, Asheville, NC
Reception: Friday, January 24, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
ART TALK Saturday January 25th at 1pm (INFO HERE)
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL) and Revolve (revolveavl.org) are pleased to present REDIRECT, a group exhibition curated by Suzanne Dittenber featuring artists Conrad Bakker, Victoria Bradbury, Ben Duvall, Janna Dyk, Benjamin Grosser, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, and Jorge Lucero.
Redirect is an exhibition that critically and philosophically engages with technology, each artist examining the web, social media, mobile devices, or other contemporary technology with a calculated sense of intentionality or caution. Redirect investigates our contemporary digital lives from various perspectives but always with a lens that looks deeper than the surface treatment. Unsearchable former content, spotlights on web censorship, crystallization of load times, and the physical manifestation of unseen systems come together to create a meditation on our present-day technological attachments.
Brooklyn-based artist and writer, Ben Duvall challenges the notion of things living forever on the web through his Anti-Archive project. For the purposes of this project, Duvall erased all content on his website every day for a year, replacing it with new content using only hand hard coding. Jorge Lucero’s work also exerts control over access with his project Slow Instagram. Images from Instagram are seen through a haze, obscured by a circular spinning icon as a result of Lucero’s delayed internet connection. The transformative experience of Janna Dyk’s work 21 Days highlights changes in our digital social habits from the last decade. In 2009, Dyk asked 36 people from 6 countries to send her both an image and a text for 21 days, resulting in 756 "spaces," each representing someone’s life and perspective. This contemporary installation of 21 Days marks the 10th anniversary of the project.
Safebook, a browser extension generated by Ben Grosser, hides all images, text, video and audio on the site, Facebook. Empty containers that previously held content prompt questions, such as “can Facebook become a safe place?” Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s project Firewall likewise exposes inherent risk in our technological systems. The not-for-profit socially-engaged research and interactive art project compares Google searches in western nations with Baidu searches in China. The results create a space for conversation about internet freedom, censorship, and disparities of access.
Conrad Bakker’s carved and painted sculptures of broken phones survey a fascination with the makeshift means people use to repair broken devices to prolong their use. Drawing attention to the physical aspects of digital engagement, Bakker assesses our willingness to look beyond the imperfections of technology. Similarly seeking an equilibrium between human and technological interaction, Victoria Bradbury’s work Electronic Ginseng 2.0 engages participants in a video game to choose the fate of environmentally-protected ginseng. The anthropomorphic responses of the plant to choices made by the participant dissolve the boundaries between digitized information and realized environmental impact.
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville is the newest part of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network of artist-run spaces and joins locations Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We are a platform for artists that is curated and organized by a group of artist-volunteers. Our mission is to create the physical, mental, and emotional space for artists to show their work, meet, and exchange ideas on their own terms. TSA GVL will specifically focus on connecting the art communities in Greenville and the greater Southeast to the global art world. TSA was founded in 2009 in Philadelphia and is a 501c3 non-profit organization. For more information please contact greenville@tigerstrikesasteroid.com.