Lafayette Anticipation associate curator Anna Colin talks to artist Tyler Coburn about Ergonomic Futures, a speculative project engaged with art, design, science, anthropology and writing. In this interview, Coburn discusses the research, production process and network of collaborators of a multilayered project ultimately concerned with the futures of humankind. Anna Colin: When one comes across your museum seats Ergonomic Futures (2016—) in contemporary art exhibitions—and soon in natural history, fine art, and anthropology museums—they look… [read more »]
DIScuss | Joshua Citarella’s Pixels
Joshua Citarella’s first solo show at Higher Pictures is a tight display of five photographs from his most recent body of work Anti-Magic. The show opens with a reclining nude peppered with cosmetic retouching marks that recalls Botticelli’s Mars and Venus. The painting has its own perspectival idiosyncracy with Venus’ right leg disappearing under her silk gown as if truncated at the hip. Perhaps Botticelli wanted to distort the female figure in the same way Citarella manipulated his nude, producing and at the same time questioning the sensuality of the body.
Mars and Venus by Botticelli, c. 1483
Joshua Citarella installation view
Below is an excerpt of a conversation the artist and I had in his Greenpoint studio shortly after the opening of his exhibition.
Joshua Citarella has the Midas touch
Physically impossible properties
Body Anointed in Nitroglycerine Awaits Transfiguration
Intentionally miscited materials.The creation of value from things that are free,
Like the transmutative exchange of jpegs
Images transmitted as exchanges of energy
Constant misdirection.Latent catholicism, God exploding into light
Platonic solids – earth wind fire and water
before molecules existed these were protomolecules
Protopixels.Pixels aren’t the building blocks
Of anything but bitmaps
Pixels are hyperplatonic forms
Algorithmically perfect.
Body Anointed with Nitroglycerin Awaits Transfiguration
Mainframe Stores Red Channel Data from REM Sleep Beta Waves
Render and Difference
Open until October 19th at Higher Pictures in New York.
Lorenzo Durantini is an artist, curator and writer working between New York, London and Florence.
