Frozen Lakes

Artists Space presents Frozen Lakes, a group exhibition featuring works by Shadi Habib Allah, Ed Atkins, Banu Cennetoglu, Aaron Flint Jamison, Tobias Kaspar, Metahaven, Ken Okiishi, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Slavs and Tatars.

In his essay accompanying the 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, and in a subsequent text published by October in 1979, the art historian Douglas Crimp introduced the work of a generation of artists, and their use of “quotation,” “excerptation,” “framing,” and “staging,” that has since become synonymous with the postmodern relationship to pictures.

Frozen Lakes examines the prominence that these artistic strategies have for a generation of artists born after Pictures and it attests to the changing nature of critical inquiry within today’s economy of image production, and the shifting relationship between information and meaning.

Images circulate and “perform” through networks of value, desire and exchange; the artists in Frozen Lakes look to inhabit these specific gestures. Through forms of leakage, reflection and freezing, their work articulates the psychological and ideological affect engendered between states of transparency and opacity. From the mediations between information leaks and brand images, to the rendering of digital surfaces as an extension of corporeality, these processes question the experience of “presence” as integral to the “establishment of meaning.”

Curated by: Stefan Kalmár, Richard Birkett.