A Way Out As Hovering
Three Videos by Ken Okiishi
08 June - 29 June 2013
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Ken Okiishi mines the production of alternative histories, potentialities, and associative meanings that emerge through the drag and drop of digital cultural montage as it collides with the always-present / always-absent body. He takes up limits within his practice— the fixity of language, the indexical limits of a photograph, the inevitability of technological decomposition, degradation, and obsolescence— and by contending with them, improvisations materialize as form. Okiishi’s work hovers over, within, and between states, structures, temporalities, and archivization.
A Way Out As Hovering could be read as a footnote to, or perhaps an expanded chapter of, The Very Quick of the Word, a publication produced by Ken Okiishi and Annie Godfrey Larmon on the occasion of Okiishi’s solo exhibition of the same name at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2013). The publication is featured alongside three videos that together offer how the artist’s investigation into the relationship of externalized material memory to subject formation has shifted over a decade of developments in technologies and networks that deploy attention for production.
Death and the College Student (1999), Telly & Casper (2000), and (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010) variously locate the precariousness of the subject within a nascent history of global data streams, feedback loops, and the metabolism of neoliberal capitalism, as portrayed by bodies that have become cognitively and affectively congested. Okiishi’s characters trace some embedded virality and versioning that is symptomatic of paying attention within an attention economy. The artist lolls around in a dorm room, sandwiched between a television playing My Own Private Idaho, The Matrix, and Rebel Without a Cause, and a wall consumed by posters of the same films. Boys hanging around an early internet New York City unwittingly slip in and out of reenactments of the Larry Clark film Kids. Diane Keaton’s character from Woody Allen’s Manhattan spouts a busted script, translated by google: “We do not haven ourselves often argued and I, I could my identity longer to a so brilliant, dominating man subordinate.” Each of these works troubles and exposes some potential for unmediated spontaneity within virtual spaces and networks.
Curated by Annie Godfrey Larmon
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Three Videos by Ken Okiishi
Death and the College Student (1999)
Telly & Casper (2000)
(Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010)
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Ken Okiishi (born 1978, Iowa, USA) lives and works in New York and Berlin. He has recently presented solo exhibitions at Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2013); Take Ninegawa, Tokyo (2012); Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York (2010); and Mehringdamm 72, Berlin (2010). In 2011, his video (Goodbye to) Manhattan was screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York, and in 2009 he was included in Performa 09, New York. Okiishi has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Based in Berlin, Berlin (2011); One is the loneliest number (with Nick Mauss), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2011); In the Middle of Affairs, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010); Camden Arts Centre, London (2009); and Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2009).
08 June - 29 June 2013
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ken Okiishi mines the production of alternative histories, potentialities, and associative meanings that emerge through the drag and drop of digital cultural montage as it collides with the always-present / always-absent body. He takes up limits within his practice— the fixity of language, the indexical limits of a photograph, the inevitability of technological decomposition, degradation, and obsolescence— and by contending with them, improvisations materialize as form. Okiishi’s work hovers over, within, and between states, structures, temporalities, and archivization.
A Way Out As Hovering could be read as a footnote to, or perhaps an expanded chapter of, The Very Quick of the Word, a publication produced by Ken Okiishi and Annie Godfrey Larmon on the occasion of Okiishi’s solo exhibition of the same name at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2013). The publication is featured alongside three videos that together offer how the artist’s investigation into the relationship of externalized material memory to subject formation has shifted over a decade of developments in technologies and networks that deploy attention for production.
Death and the College Student (1999), Telly & Casper (2000), and (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010) variously locate the precariousness of the subject within a nascent history of global data streams, feedback loops, and the metabolism of neoliberal capitalism, as portrayed by bodies that have become cognitively and affectively congested. Okiishi’s characters trace some embedded virality and versioning that is symptomatic of paying attention within an attention economy. The artist lolls around in a dorm room, sandwiched between a television playing My Own Private Idaho, The Matrix, and Rebel Without a Cause, and a wall consumed by posters of the same films. Boys hanging around an early internet New York City unwittingly slip in and out of reenactments of the Larry Clark film Kids. Diane Keaton’s character from Woody Allen’s Manhattan spouts a busted script, translated by google: “We do not haven ourselves often argued and I, I could my identity longer to a so brilliant, dominating man subordinate.” Each of these works troubles and exposes some potential for unmediated spontaneity within virtual spaces and networks.
Curated by Annie Godfrey Larmon
~
~
Three Videos by Ken Okiishi
Death and the College Student (1999)
Telly & Casper (2000)
(Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010)
~
Ken Okiishi (born 1978, Iowa, USA) lives and works in New York and Berlin. He has recently presented solo exhibitions at Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2013); Take Ninegawa, Tokyo (2012); Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York (2010); and Mehringdamm 72, Berlin (2010). In 2011, his video (Goodbye to) Manhattan was screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York, and in 2009 he was included in Performa 09, New York. Okiishi has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Based in Berlin, Berlin (2011); One is the loneliest number (with Nick Mauss), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2011); In the Middle of Affairs, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010); Camden Arts Centre, London (2009); and Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2009).
