Life Feed: New Works by Jeremy Bailey and Antoine Catala

the New Museum

Fri Jun, 24 2011, 7PM

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Jeremy Bailey and Antoine Catala are two artists who have both taken interest in the webcam as a medium and a subject, from divergent perspectives. Bailey, who lives in Toronto, creates webcam performances in which he manipulates animated models while spinning out monologues with a nerdy lack of self-awareness --both excessive, even grotesque, challenges to assumptions of transparency in screen and self. Recently, Bailey has been experimenting with thought-controlled technology, devices that respond to readings of their users' brainwaves, to imagine one extreme that future telecom technology might take and to satirize art-critical cliches about the uniqueness of the artist's mind and works that make the artist's process transparent. Catala, a French artist based in New York, has made sculptures using television as readymade, a treatment of the medium that applies to the material of the monitor as much as it does to the images of whatever channel it happens to be tuned to. For Catala, lifecasting -- the practice of non-stop transmission of oneself via webcam -- represents both the movement of broadcast technology from the professional studio to the home as well as a concentrated instance of the constant self-design and performance that the social internet requires -- a demand that he, like most artists who make their work available online for market and exhibition systems, feels particularly acutely. On June 24, Bailey and Catala will present new works drawing on these recent areas of study. This event is curated by Brian Droitcour.