Art at Reading’s Hannah Sawtell has been specially commissioned to create two linked, site-specific exhibitions, Osculator at the ICA, and Vendor at Bloomberg SPACE. These exhibitions of video work and installation mark Sawtell’s first solo projects in the UK. Both exhibitions employ material developed from Sawtell’s experience of the Bloomberg office space during her current residency.
Over the next few months the artist will compile material from the digital realm, sourcing images from the internet and live screen-shots of news footage on Bloomberg’s office monitors. Her visual inventory of ‘contemporary material’ or ‘surfaces’, explore the boundaries of image production and consider the culture of over-proliferation. Sawtell’s parallel semi-archival projects will investigate the politics of seduction as well as the idea of the ‘market’ through spatial and visual devices. By categorising and recording certain images, the artist reveals new relationships between objects and creates playful but critical dialectical encounters.
Operating as ‘real-time’ collages, Sawtell’s video and image-based works reconstruct contemporary media as fragmentary documents that collide visual tones with digital noise. By utilising generic editing programmes to cut digital information and formats, Sawtell initiates a process that designates the computer and its screen as a lens.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, distributed as an insert in Business Week, with essays by Alun Rowlands (University of Reading) and Diedrich Diedrichsen.
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