Ken Okiishi

gesture/data (thumbnail scale), 2014
chroma key blue video paint on flatscreen, Barco CRT blue screen videoed by HD camera transferred to .mov transferred to .mp4 re-compressed to 2000 kbps (color, silent, usb stick)

exhibited at Maccarone, Light Industry Benefit Art Auction, January 28-31, 2014
courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings

In KEN OKIISHIs work gesture/data, the screen surface itself becomes a tension-laden crystallization point. It’s dynamic blue spectrum is generated by means of digital hand-video shots, which show the display of a BARCO monitor. With the so-called ‘blue screen’, gesture/data documents the visual testimony of a loss of signal, whose glowing blue varies in tone and intensity depending on camera setting and proximityBrought close the convex honeycomb of the analog screen, the handheld camera gives the pixelated blue tone a digitally generated depth. This effect is further reinforced through the transcoding of the material into the exhibited .mp4 format: Pixels begin to emerge from the honeycomb structure to subsequently hover above the blue surface. 

OKIISHI‘s works not only stage a collision of digital and analog technologies, but also, and more significantly, constitute the supposedly emptied product of  repeated transcoding. As digital artifacts, they embody the clash of various image and signal disruptions  – phenomena in which the materiality of modern media manifests itself. (…) Their unique aesthetic is the result, not least, of a dynamic interplay between foreground and background, ‘in screen’ and ‘on screen’.*

Good news: you still have a few days to catch KEN OKIISHI’s exhibition at Reena Spaulings in New York. If you can’t make it either because you are too far away or you didn’t get a slot, you can see some of the exhibition views via contemporary art daily.

KEN OKIISHI lives and works in New York and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (2013); Mathew, Berlin (2012); Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (2012); Alex Zachary, New York (2010); and Mehringdamm 72, Berlin (2010). Recent group exhibitions include: Artists Space, New York (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013); Kunsthalle Bern (2012); White Columns, New York (2012); GAMeC, Bergamo (2012).

* text from the press release Speculations on Anonymous Materials at Fridericianum Kassel



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