Free For $8
The New Museum of Art in New York City is currently hosting an exhibition carrying work from 23 artists titled “Free”. The show explores: “how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space.” Perhaps with a firm tongue-in-cheek approach the only other exhibition running at the museum right now is called “The Last Newspaper”.
The works, curated by Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome (a non profit which supports artists using technology) and New Museum Adjunct Curator, include video, sculpture, drawings photography, sound and animation.
Some of the highlights are Jon Rafman’s prints harvested from Google Streetview images that reinvent the concept of street photography. The large digital prints show Streetview images of a naked woman on the beach, a burning house on a suburban street in the US and Irish teenagers flipping the bird to the Streetview camera.
Jon Rafman (courtesy of artist's website)
Hanne Mugaas’s installation work includes objects bought exclusively on Ebay as part of her comment on “how art is translated outside of its primary market, and adopted and even re-created by popular culture. It acts as a small exhibition of art as it is popularly bought and sold—not through gallery backrooms, but on eBay.”
Hanne Mugaas (pic courtesy New Museum's website)
Kirstin Lucas’s work is a set of drawings depicting her application to have her name changed in a US court. As part of her art project Lucas officially “refreshed” her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas as if she were a website.
Clunie Reid’s work, a series of beautiful collage-type black and white inkjet prints on silver foil that are composed of images found online and then photographed and reprinted. The artist’s rationale for the work points to the “overwhelming sensation of navigating a loosely managed, chaotic environment.”
The exhibition is a must see for any persons interested in new media, technology and their interface. Student admission is $8.
“Free” is currently showing on the New Museum 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side New York City. Tel: (212) 219-1222. Show ends on the 23 January 2011. Visit: www.newmuseum.org.