Kristin McIver | Impressions
25 June – 27 July 2020
Location/Dislocation is a new series of artworks, to be presented as a 3-part exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery (New York), MARS Gallery (Melbourne), Royale Projects (Los Angeles). The mixed media works examine the relationship between the flow of water, and the flow of data.
In a digital society governed by algorithms and big data, information which flows through networks (unfettered by borders) becomes the referent from which the participants of digital culture base their knowledge, identity, ideals, and allegiances. However, the algorithmic filters which serve this information are susceptible to manipulation, and this is where the perception of the world becomes a slippery slope of non-truths and misinformation.
The climate crisis, with its extreme weather events of hurricanes, floods and glacial melts, is one such example of the manipulation of data. Global warming is a truth which has become flexible & fluid when convenient for those whose profits would be impacted by a solution. Despite countless data sets by scientists indicating its actuality as fact, disinformation has been disseminated across ever-narrowing information channels to counter this factual status. Each region this exhibition traverses has been a direct victim of data’s malleable state.
By using water as a conceptual device, these artworks expose the nature of truth as a fluid and malleable concept, and one whose integrity can no longer be determined. So, too, “water collapses all the time, constantly sacrifices all form, tends only to humble itself, flattens itself onto ground.” – Francis Ponge.
Just as water (and data) has no defined form or fixed location, the artworks I create for this series will exist in multiple forms, sacrificing their form as they navigate across 3 locations in America and Australia; from video sculptures and large scale projections, to natural found objects and immersive sound installations. Their physical form and subject matter will mutate and transform as the works move from one continent to another, traversing the earth’s oceans and land masses.
Some components from the exhibition in New York, will be presented in Melbourne in a different form. For example, a floor covered with sand will inherit footprints from the exhibition’s visitors. One of these American footprints will be cast and presented as a solid object in Melbourne. Video shot in Curacao, will be presented in Melbourne alongside local footage, and another which is livestreamed from Los Angeles. One of the objects will contain ‘real’ water, presented in motion and in the same sculptural form as the videos, indiscernible from its digital counterparts.
For the sculptural components, the video will be encapsulated in clear, solid plexi-cubes, with the moving image reflected on the top surface. The cube appears invisible from the sides, causing the appearance of a ‘floating image’. This optical device urges the viewer to question the source of the image. The artworks will engage viewers and encourage discovery through varying heights and scales, and will invite viewers to move between a full immersion within a soundscape, to the discovery of a small video in a seemingly clear minimalist sculpture.
The artworks will exist in a state of flux over the course of their lifetime across 3 locations, presenting viewers with a confluence of real/representation, live/pre-recorded, here/there. Time and location will be fluid, interchangeable. The source locations will only be revealed in the work’s titles, as geo-tag data and time stamps (Eg: 29.3487234 -75.45787234, 02/02/19, 12:23).
My multi-disciplinary conceptual practice includes sculpture, painting, video, sound and installation. The mixed media installations and artworks explore themes of identity, culture, and new forms of representation in the digital age. Recent works examine personal identity and its relationship to social media, and how the participants of digital culture become both the subject and object of the information cycle, as they share their thoughts, stories, images, locations, and identity online. My artworks propose that ideologies served to consumers through traditional and social media, empowered by advancing technologies, and driven by market forces, become referents for new models of self-representation.
In 2014, I completed a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) at University of Melbourne (Victorian College of the Arts), with a thesis You and Me: Models of Self-Representation in Participatory Culture. Public acquisitions include the National Gallery of Victoria (2013) and Latrobe University Museum of Art (2014). A Questionable Choice was awarded the Melbourne Sculpture Prize in 2012. Other exhibitions and achievements include Melbourne Now (National Gallery of Victoria, 2013), 24:7 (Times Square, NY 2017), Sites Of Knowledge (New York, 2017), Data Portraits (Royale Projects, LA 2015), Data Portraits (Royale Projects: Contemporary Art, California 2013), ME/ME (Chasm Gallery, New York, 2014), Status Quo (James Makin Gallery, Victoria 2013), Vancouver Biennale Residency Program (2015), Art OMI Residency, New York (2013), Incinerator Art Award (finalist 2014) and Keith & Elizabeth Murdoch Fellowship (finalist 2011 and 2013).
I am represented by Royale Projects : Contemporary Art (California, USA). My work is held in public and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, UK and North America.
