NYAB Event - Yael Kanarek “Kisses Kisses”

Yael Kanarek “Kisses Kisses”

Bitforms Gallery

[Image: Yael Kanarek "Feedback-Loop" (2004) 20 x 15 x 27 in.]

This event has ended.

Tangerine sky. A ray illuminates my neck. It stays there. Time suspended. I key my notes into the laptop. Letters dispel the handwriting and elude my temper, paper, and the ballpoint pen.

The laptop welcomes the letters and assigns them numbers. Electric-alive, my idiom flickers on the screen. Delighted in the power of computation: Copy, paste, find, replace. CTRL+Z. Power. Speed. I penetrate.

–– Yael Kanarek, A Traveler’s Journal: Faithfully recorded

bitforms gallery presents Kisses Kisses, a retrospective iteration of Yael Kanarek’s World of Awe. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Since 1994, Kanarek has developed a multimedia narrative and all of its constituent parts––spanning net art, painting, sculpture, performance, and musical composition––ultimately creating a world unto itself. This is the World of Awe. Previously exhibited as a series of browser-based chapters, Kisses Kisses presents twenty years of world-making as a holistic installation, including ephemera and never before seen paintings.

The narrative of World of Awe is conveyed through a lone traveler searching for lost treasure. Anonymous, androgynous, and somewhere between amorphous and human, the traveler is depicted in Kanarek’s paintings from the early nineties, and is the guiding voice in the browser-based works. Crossing through a portal at 419 E 6th Street in Manhattan, the traveler enters into a virtual desert in a perpetual state of dawn and dusk. Throughout World of Awe, we continuously find ourselves confronted with blurring binaries: digital and analogue, virtual and real, masculine and feminine, fine art and craft, fact and fiction.

Rooted in the emergence of internet culture in the nineties, World of Awe is a reflection on the rapidly changing landscape brought about by digital networked technologies at that time. As radical as the accessibility of the internet was in the early nineties, its development has shaped the formative years of a generation. This generation’s coming of age calls for the latest iteration of World of Awe, which manifests as Kisses Kisses. Across media and time, this body of work negotiates what it means to move, live, and long in the Information Age.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a fanzine with an essay by Kerry Doran and a conversation between Kanarek and co-curator Dylan Kerr will be published. Jennifer Dalton’s 1997 essay “Yael Kanarek’s Love Letters from a World of Awe” will be republished with an addendum by Doran and Kanarek.

–– Kerry Doran