FAUX REALITIES
LONDON
ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY
2017
FAUX REALITIES
FAUX REALITIES is an exhibition of photographs exploring the nature of perception in the age of Photoshop.
Most images have been highly color-edited and stylistically altered, merging the practice of photography with digital painting.
This was the debut solo exhibition with Annka Kultys Gallery in London in 2017.
Photography from the Faux Realities Exhibition
the exhibition features three video works
1. when you die, your camera roll flashes before your eyes (2019)
2. digital streams: stories 2016-2019
3. digital streams of infinity
when you die, your camera roll flashes before your eyes
Video screen capture, 2019
When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes Before Your Eyes (2019) is a video of a screen recording of my unedited camera roll speeding through the years 2016-2019. The title and concept is based off of a joke I often make about the nature of digital existence, and how scrolling through our camera roll mimics the classic saying that, "When you die your life flashes before your eyes". It is fascinating to me that modern technology and digital photography is able to simulate such an ephemeral and transcendental experience as this pre-death phenomena.
Exhibition View of When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes Before Your Eyes (Annka Kultys Gallery)
DIGITAL STREAMS: STORIES 2016-2019
Video, 2019
Digital Streams: Stories 2016-2019 is a 20-minute curation of selected Instagram Stories and Snapchats from 2016-2019. The video is edited to highlight some of the reoccuring themes in my work, as well as to provide examples of how daily life can become a medium for us to create art with in the age of social media.
Stills from Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness: Stories 2016–2019 (2019).
DIGITAL STREAMS OF INFINITY:
video Screen capture projected onto wall
Digital Streams of Infinity is a video painting of an infinite feedback loop, projected onto a wall.
The video runs for 20 minutes and showcases the psychedelic color spectrum which occurs when an iPhone captures its own reflection. The colors of the rainbow begin flashing, occasionally creating an overwhelming strobe effect, hovering between black and white to showcase the dimensions of color waves.
press release
DIGITAL STREAMS OF AN UPLOADABLE CONSCIOUSNESS: STORIES 2016-2019
PRESS RELEASE (c/o ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY)
Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Signe Pierce. The show marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with Annka Kultys since joining the gallery in 2017. For Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness: Stories 2016-2019, the artist has curated a selection of her videos originally exhibited via Instagram and Snapchat Stories. Pierce will utilise projections and screens (‘modern canvases’) to reformat and recontextualise her videos within a gallery setting. The show is an exploration of Pierce’s self-coined term and identity as a “Reality Artist.”
Signe Pierce’s practice encompasses performance, video, photography, writing and digital installations. She aligns and identifies with the notion of being a ‘Reality Artist’, a term Pierce acknowledges is at once enigmatic and paradoxical by nature, melding two highly subjective and contested concepts (reality and art). Pierce uses her body, the camera and her surroundings to produce films, performances, photographs and web-based works with a singularly flashy, neon, urban aesthetic. Through her work, she posits questions regarding gender, identity, sexuality and reality within an increasingly digital world.
There are three video works presented in the exhibition. The first follows the exhibition’s title, Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness: Stories 2016–2019 (2019). This video piece, presented on a TV monitor, is a twenty-minute-long amalgamation of the artist’s Instagram and Snapchat stories from the past three and a half years—items Pierce has uploaded to the internet for the internet’s consumption. It is not chronological, and it is not intended to cohere. For example, in one piece Pierce compares a pile of trash to Dutch still-life and in the next, she is critiquing tech companies’ abuse of our data. The idea is to create a raw compilation that provides viewers with an immediate impression of the type of commentary that Pierce is interested in creating, as well as the kind of performer the artist is.
The second is When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes before Your Eyes (2019). Also presented on a TV monitor, this piece is an accelerated infinite scroll through the artist’s iPhone photo library. When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes before Your Eyes highlights Pierce’s interest in examining art world hierarchies and the currency of digital content. Unusually for works of art, both Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness: Stories 2016–2019 and When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes before Your Eyes will evolve over time, and if acquired by a collector for example, will be periodically updated with new content.
The third and final work in the show is Digital Streams of Infinity (Reality Painting) (2019). Presented as a projection on the back wall of the gallery, it can be described as a billowing browser window, a simulacrum for viewers to get lost in.
EXHIBITION PHOTOS