(courtesy Faith Holland and TRANSFER Gallery)
Few visual modes speak for and to our times as perfectly as animated GIFs. Easily replicable, lightweight memory-wise, and requiring the most minimal attention span while also rewarding endless repetition, GIFs circulate frantically through our collective social consciousness and eerily mimic the state of our discourse.
Faith Holland is a consistently rewarding new media artist who deals with memes, GIFs, and the general ephemera of the digital vernacular in ways that are humorous without being unserious. Holland in many ways flattens any remaining high/low distinctions into a totally recognizable hyper-present; her website describes her mediums as including video and performance and GIFs, while identifying significant themes to be pornography, the internet, beauty, and cats.
This Saturday, Holland’s solo exhibition, Speculative Fetish, which “addresses the way that technology functions as metaphor for the body, both in the language we use and in the ways we behave” concludes at TRANSFER gallery. To mark the occasion, Holland presents an evening of animated GIFs featuring more than 35 contributing artists, who “speculate on fetishes that do not exist, from getting turned out by the beam of a projector to a particularly salacious abstract painting and everything in-between.”
When: Saturday, January 6, 6–10 pm
Where: TRANSFER Gallery (1030 Metropolitan Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn)
More info on TRANSFER’s Facebook.
