COOPER COLE is pleased to announce a solo exhibition from gallery artist Georgia Dickie titled Stivverin'.
This exhibition will debut an new body of the artist's sculptural works and feature an accompanying essay written by Lucas Soi.
Not all banalities are totally dada, but every banality hides a load of dadaistic nonsense.
- Kurt Schwitters
Early incarnations of the Internet relied upon the user's anonymity when connecting to the virtual public. Cyberspace was an environment where the user could be who they wanted to be, rather than who they actually were. Activity was conducted in stealth, through chat rooms and instant messages. With a simple setting all browser history could be erased, leaving no trail of the sites visited and people talked to. Yet in the 21st century, Web 2.0 relies upon users creating a permanent record of their activity by uploading evidence from their everyday lives in real time. Thanks to user-generated content, social networking sites help compile this information together to identify and define people through their own efforts and actions.
The German critic Boris Groys has observed that "social networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter… offer global populations the opportunity to post their photos, videos, and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished from any other conceptualist or post-conceptualist artwork."1 This "accidental audience," according to American critic Brad Troemel, has embraced the virtual tools of production and elaborated on this process of pastiche, "without any particular awareness that they are engaging with 'art' at all." 2 In the same way that people gather experience and knowledge during their lifetime, so do objects. In the material world, every object accrues a bounty of information that it holds intrinsically through time. The inherent history contained in the most banal fabricated materials accumulates the longer it is used and valued. The popular saying "if these walls could talk" is a fitting anecdote to define the historical properties of our built environment.