Addie Wagenknecht “everyday the same again”
Bitforms Gallery
[Image: Addie Wagenknecht, detail of "American Flag 1" (2021)]
This event has ended.
bitforms gallery present every day the same again, Addie Wagenknecht’s third solo exhibition. Wagenknecht frequently repurposes systems with an ethos of hacker culture, usurping materials—such as cosmetics, surveillance devices, Roombas, and pharmaceuticals—of their inherent function to encourage the tension between expression and the programmed role of devices. The artist has long examined elements of visibility and identity, and in the continuing tide of Covid-19 she positions this exhibition as an inquiry towards America as both a foreigner and a citizen. The pandemic acts as a lens and guiding structure for Wagenknecht’s studies from across the Atlantic.
American Flag 1–3 is a sterile installation of three pedestals mounted with archival paper. Above each plinth ink slowly drips from IVs. Over time, this performance reveals an abstracted image as red ink pools and cascades into blue puddles. Negative space completes the configuration, an inky rendering of the American flag. Jasper Johns’ seminal flag paintings, in particular Three Flags (1958), served as great inspiration to Wagenknecht during this period of study. Nested inside one another, Johns’ composition highlights the structure of the flag as an object as well as a national emblem. Wagenknecht echoes this approach by favoring process over end result, refiguring America drop by drop.
The exhibition will continue online with a series of videos prompted by the artist’s 2017 web-based work, Believe Me. Inspired by Donald Trump’s most spoken words of that year, the interactive piece simulates the fractured viewpoint of browsing images on a shattered smartphone screen. Believe Me 1.2–1.4 implements the American flag as a source image. Throughout each video sections of stars and stripes flicker, splinter, and rearrange in a procedure that personifies Wagenknecht’s current consideration of the United States. every day the same again extends the artist’s investigation of the flag as a totem of the American Dream and its shattered utopias.
Media
Schedule
from October 16, 2021 to November 13, 2021
Opening Reception on 2021-10-16 from 16:00 to 18:00