April 6 – June 2, 2018
Opening Reception, April 7 (check gallery website for hours)
Transfer Gallery
1030 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to present Still Life, Rhonda Holberton’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from April 6 – June 2, 2018 at Transfer Gallery, NY.
Still Life features a networked video installation, prints rendered from augmented reality, immersive wallpaper constructed from bump map imaging, and gold mined from the California landscape. The installation peels back multiple layers of material translation to reveal a displaced human body within contemporary systems of value creation.
As the title Still Life suggests, this exhibition utilizes material and process to transgress the boundary between stillness and life. Materials run the gamut from gold dust and mosquitoes, to psychic readings and mannequins salvaged from the American Apparel bankruptcy liquidation. These objects are not simply things in themselves. Rather, they carry a coded memory of their personal, material, and cultural relations. The works weave together to form a narrative documenting the artist’s attempts to make sense of the corporeal body within a dematerialized landscape.
Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and blockchain accounting are already destabilizing the role of the body in manufacturing, transportation, finance, and communication. Holberton’s investigations attempt to recover the value of the biological body through labor and material transformation.
Holberton explains, “I wanted to insert my body into a local system that indexes a much larger system, what Timothy Morton would call a hyperobject, something too large and complicated to be understood by a single human processor. The works represent my attempts to engage corporeally within a global metabolism represented in concepts of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene- to pull value out of the system through direct physical labor.”
Today, the technology boom of Silicon Valley parallels last century’s gold rush; both activities belong to a similar narrative circumscribed by masculine entrepreneurial ideology. Similarly it’s hard not to think about the mosquito without thinking of the virus, currently one closely associated with fertility and as index of a changing climate. These works offer a reminder that while the bio-technical divide grows ever more transparent, we are still very much dependent on the ‘six-inch layer of topsoil, and the fact that it rains.’
http://www.rhondaholberton.com
http://cultexhibitions.com/
http://transfergallery.com/
