an exhibition by
CORNROW RIDER

“And it is this exiled, foreclosed uncertainty which haunts systems and generates the illusion of the economic, the political, and so on. It is the failure to understand this which leads systems into incoherence, hypertrophy, and, in some sense, leads them to destroy themselves. For it is from the inside, by overreaching themselves, that systems make bonfires of their own postulates, and fall into ruins.” (Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange)

SWIPE Country is the fictional subject/object/place of desire and fulfillment advertised in Ad Vice, a video made by artist Tony Cokes over a decade ago. While the Internet may be seen as an intersection for cultural exodus as well as stagnation, the banner ad space has become the illogical (though perhaps highly logical and predictable) extreme where nightmare and paradise exist. Our consciousness is checked at the screen and left at the mercy of commercial culture. Images commodities glanced at and glossed over are not free and come with a well-hidden cost. With this in mind, Cornrow Rider has critically responded to the space of the online banner ad and the average user experience while traversing the Internet.

Proper nouns and corporate logos, stripped of their color and context, appear as disjunctive captions or titles to both dramatic and hackneyed images. Proper nouns loaded with strong historical and socio-political associations layered with images out of a travel brochure or stock religious imagery nevertheless disrupts web-grazing visual complacency. Corporate logos appear to be in sync with prosaic visual tropes, yet these advertisements are unauthorized and dis-endorse the owners of the stolen logos and commonly understood associations with platitudinous imagery of sunsets or bucolic natives. By orchestrating an intersection between anonymous stock imagery and identifiable proper nouns, the work is directed towards a slippage between two distinct forms of commercial imagery – one that is intended to produce desire and one that communicates an identity.

Through repetition, reversal, and rearrangement, other corporate logos are reduced from powerful signifiers to pure decoration and visual surface data. While in the same body of work, cropped documentation from a meditative performance enshrines what at times might seem to be entirely nonsensical and irrational values and are yet held in common and reverence under the insignia of media superpowers. Who is at the helm of these empires that have overtaken the immaterial territory of our minds, social mores, and visual culture?

These works may appear to be simple gestures that do not go beyond singular irony; however, the attentive user may also consider a complex web of associations (formal, visual, political, cultural, economic, sexual, racial). More likely, the typical receiver will not give a second thought to these images. These tiny interventions and deceptively simple juxtapositions will simply come and go as briefly anomalous blips within our consciousness. The deeper objective, however, is to continually seed the images and text of detournément within our subconscious – that perhaps will one day lead to the “bonfires of our postulates” and fresh ruins that precede new deliverance.

Members of CORNROW RIDER have exhibited independently in both galleries and museums worldwide, including venues such as The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, US; Envoy Enterprises, New York, US; The Hermitage Foundation, Norfolk, US; Harper St. Cinema, UK; Preteen Gallery, Hermosillo, MX; Sloten House Projects, NL; USSA Fine Arts, New York, US; The Union Gallery, New York, US: San Francisco Art Institute, Walter McBean Gallery, SF, US; and Boulevard es Brezsnyev Gallery, Budapest, Hungary.

cornrowrider.com

Curated by Michelle Y. Hyun