Click Here
January 21 – March 26, 2017│ Arlington Arts Center │ Arlington, VA
artists
Rachel Bone│Nancy Daly│Michelle Lisa Herman│Dina Kelberman│Lindsay McCulloch│Molly Springfield│Jenny Walton│Stephanie Williams
overview
Eight artists explore the organic, commoditized, and fabricated experiences where the lens of various web-based happenings, engagements, and absurdity play a major role.
excerpt from essay
In the world of retweets, regrams and now reactions, we are ever constant consumers of material culture in the ever-expanding chasm of the internet, including art. As the internet continues to grow, taking root in and changing all aspects of life, so changes art. Where high artistic achievement was once defined in strictly academic terms, now we see a democratization of the field throughout all the absurd realms of the World Wide Web. So what does it mean to be an artist in the age of the internet?
As a host to a plethora of diverse spaces from commercial shopping sites to the deeply personal e-journal blogs, from peer-reviewed research databases to open forum crowdsourced wikis, the internet is varied in its representation of women – some of it positive and empowering, often much of it not. Similarly Hollywood’s representation of the “tech genius” or “digital creator” is often that of the gangly white male, see HBO’s popular Silicon Valley for example. As the perception of women as residents of digital space, creators of it, and subjects within it often skews non-feminist, this exhibition explores the role of the internet through art through women’s voices alone. This exhibition forces the viewer to inhabit the perspective of women artists interpreting the internet in various ways as a means to provide an alternative outlook on the meaning of art in the digital age, and more broadly: the meaning of humanism in the age of the internet. The perspectives within Click Here are as varied as the internet itself – from humorous to critical to playful and beyond.
press
Curatorally 