Sunday, September 22, 2013

Two New Exhibitions: Cloud Banks and Precipitations

Now that the "Shu Lea Chaeng and Mark Amerika" two-person exhibition at Furtherfield has been successfully launched, I must devote a good portion of my attention and energy to three new shows opening over the next two weeks. The first two shows are curated by Lanfranco Aceti and Ozden Sahin:

My solo show Cloud Banks, at Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, explores the way artists, political and economic theorists, metaphysical philosophers, and businessmen use language as a tool to construct their vision of the world as they see it. As with much of my conceptual net art, the title is a pun, one that refers to both a weather phenomenon – a layer of clouds seen from a distance – and the recent rise of both cloud computing and too-big-to-fail banking systems.

The remix methodology I employed for these large print works involves taking numerous texts from authors such as Immanuel Kant, John Ruskin, P. T. Barnum, Andy Warhol, Raoul Vaneigem, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, as well as various documents produced by Conceptual artists of the 1960s, to produce experimental tag clouds that reveal both the writer’s use of language and the thematic subjects they obsessed over. I then manipulate the tag clouds by mashing up some of the texts for aesthetic and political effect. For example, in the show at Kasa Gallery, two of the works on exhibit mash up Conceptual art documents with John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy out of which emerge a subset of tag clouds titled Conceptual Art Mill.

My second solo show, Precipitations, was developed in conjunction with the physical gallery show in Istanbul and will be more of a network distributed exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts and featured daily throughout the exhibition run as updated online images. The images for each show are generated by employing similar algorithmic and typographical processes but the visualizations that I have chosen for each exhibition vary from horizontal cloud banks to vertical word rain.

Soon I will post an entry about my fourth solo or two-person exhibition this fall, Glitch_Click_Thunk, opening on October 6, 2013 at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery in conjunction with inaugural CONVERGENCE event taking place in Honolulu.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, exhibitions, Istanbul, Honolulu, London, Cloud Banks, Precipitations, Glitch