A show of documentations of artworks by: Kathryn Andrews, Brendan Anton Jaks, Eva Berendes, Simon Denny, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Patrick Hill, Tilman Hornig, Dan Rees, Philipp Timischl, Anne de Vries.
As artists we create images, as curators we believe in their potential; their potential to be seen, to travel, to expand and inspire. Thanks to High Definition, one can now see the actual colours, textures or materials of an artwork, from behind a screen. With the Internet, it is now possible to get a better idea of a show, a museum collection without even visiting it in the flesh. To be honest, we never had the chance to contemplate most of these exhibited artworks for real and this show is the occasion to experiment with a ‘Real Life’ exhibition format in the digital age.
Every artist now has to consider the ‘second life’ of his/her work. Once the exhibition is over, the work goes back into storage while its documentation starts a career online (and the photograph better be a good one!). By using some controversial and subjective selection criteria such as the online virility of the image, its visual impact, the quality of the picture taken, Screen Play reveals a primordial aspect of contemporary art production today. We find something very primitive in exhibiting images we see online each day. Playing back and forth between 3D and 2D, we re inject these documentations of artworks in their natural environment in a way to see what it does to show images of artworks within the exhibition space. Obviously, nothing can replace the sensation of seeing a work in the flesh, but could its representation create something else, something you can’t get with the actual artwork?
We created itsourplayground.com four years ago to host online exhibitions built around documentations of artworks mixed with found images, GIFs, videos and texts. The site’s homepage is a playful, immaterial space that picks up on the qualities that are inherent to the internet (ease of access, practically without monetary charge, rapidity), to produce surprising narratives, deconstructing the hierarchy that usually reigns among documents.
Screen Play pursues a reflexion around the mode of diffusion and propagation of artworks through their documentation and could also be seen as an experimental human scale model of our website. Screen Play will also be the occasion of an online show which will be launched this summer on www.itsourplayground.com.
Curated by Camille Le Houezec & Joey Villemont
