Signe Pierce 'Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness : Stories 2016-2019'

Opening reception : Wednesday, 5 March, 6-8 PM

Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Signe Pierce. The show marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with Annka Kultys since joining the gallery in 2017. For Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness: Stories 2016-2019, the artist has curated a selection of her videos originally exhibited via Instagram and Snapchat Stories. Pierce will utilise projections and screens (‘modern canvases’) to reformat and recontextualise her videos within a gallery setting. The show is an exploration of Pierce’s self-coined term and identity as a “Reality Artist.”

Signe Pierce’s practice encompasses performance, video, photography, writing and digital installations. She aligns and identifies with the notion of being a ‘Reality Artist’, a term Pierce acknowledges is at once enigmatic and paradoxical by nature, melding two highly subjective and contested concepts (reality and art). Pierce uses her body, the camera and her surroundings to produce films, performances, photographs and web-based works with a singularly flashy, neon, urban aesthetic. Through her work, she posits questions regarding gender, identity, sexuality and reality within an increasingly digital world.

There are three video works presented in the exhibition. The first follows the exhibition’s title,Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness:Stories 2016–2019(2019). This video piece, presented on a TV monitor, is a twenty-minute-long amalgamation of the artist’s Instagram and Snapchat stories from the past three and a half years—items Pierce has uploaded to the internet for the internet’s consumption. It is not chronological, and it is not intended to cohere. For example, in one piece Pierce compares a pile of trash to Dutch still-life and in the next, she is critiquing tech companies’ abuse of our data. The idea is to create a raw compilation that provides viewers with an immediate impression of the type of commentary that Pierce is interested in creating, as well as the kind of performer the artist is.

The second isWhen You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes before Your Eyes(2019). Also presented on a TV monitor, this piece is an accelerated infinite scroll through the artist’s iPhone photo library. When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes before Your Eyeshighlights Pierce’s interest in examining art world hierarchies and the currency of digital content. Unusually for works of art, both Digital Streams of an Uploadable Consciousness:Stories 2016–2019and When You Die, Your Camera Roll Flashes before Your Eyeswill evolve over time, and if acquired by a collector for example, will be periodically updated with new content.

The third and final work in the show is Digital Streams of Infinity (Reality Painting)(2019). Presented as a projection on the back wall of the gallery, it can be described as a billowing browser window, a simulacrum for viewers to get lost in.

Signe Pierce was born in Arizona in 1988 and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2011. Pierce debuted at Annka Kultys Gallery in 2017 with “Faux Realities”, an exhibition of 30 photos that questioned the nature of truth and artifice within the digital image, and showed again at the gallery in 2018 with “Metamirrorism”, an exhibition the artist also presented that year at the Athens Biennial. Pierce’s recent shows include “World Receivers” at Zabludowicz Collection in London, and “Maske” at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn.

Her video work and performances have been shown at MoMA, New York (2019); MdbK, Leipzig, Germany (2018); Athens Biennial, Greece (2018); Düsseldorf Photo, Germany (2018); the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014); and the New Museum, New York (2014).

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