a kind of symbiosis i will never understand

a kind of symbiosis i will never understand
April 26 - May 17, 2015
Free Paarking

Ann Hirsch, Brian Khek, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki-Olivo)

a kind of symbiosis i will never understand, featuring video work from Puppies Puppies, Ann Hirsch, and Brian Khek, isolates the moment when the domestic becomes alien. New, uncanny meanings emerge from mundane spaces; living rooms become pornographic, microwaves tell the future, and robots enter the home. At times incomprehensible, these new spaces are ripe with contradiction: they are both extraordinarily strange and profoundly normal.

With an irreverent eye, Puppies Puppies offers an acidic, roving commentary on what it means to be a contemporary cultural consumer. A short untitled video follows the artist’s ongoing line of inquiry into the way our very being is intersected by capital. In this polyphonic video, Puppies Puppies combines eerily lifelike Japanese robots with a soliloquy from Kanzi, the well-known talking bonobo. In Loop1.mov, Puppies Puppies sutures the visual vocabulary of Hollywood fantasy films and viral internet memes with the bloody reality of the fast food industry. The video’s accelerated imagery and discordant rhythms parallel fast food’s frenetic advertisements and often unpalatable products.

Ann Hirsch’s The Work of Being Watched is an elaboration on her experience as a contestant in Frank the Entertainer... in A Basement Affair, a VH1 dating reality show. The work, video documentation of a 2012 performance, is a poetic analysis of the gendered violence inherent to reality TV.

Rather than leveling criticisms against the violence of the camera or of the fast food restaurant, Brian Khek locates his project within the domestic sphere. Capricorn LG consists of an anonymous figure (played by Diamond Stingily) ritually opening and closing her fridge and microwave doors. Khek underscores the banal futility of her gesture with appropriated text from horoscopes and Amazon reviews of kitchen appliances.

Curated by Amelia Farley and Henry Osman.

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