ANTONY CAIRNS
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present its new exhibition Deconstructive Narrative, a duo show featuring artists and photographers Lilly Lulay and Antony Cairns. It is their first exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 17th from 3PM to 6:30PM in the gallery space located at 16 East 71st Street, New York, NY, 10021
Deconstructive Narrative considers the subject of modern technology as a new medium and domain that allows for new experiments and original aesthetics. The artists Lilly Lulay and Antony Cairns take on this subject in their own way and subtly manifest an innovative sense for reimagining and configuring the narrative of their purpose.
For Lilly Lulay (b. in 1976), from communication tool and Algorithms, technology overpower the human being social behavior. Today the mobile phone, an indispensable technological tool today, carries within itself a new world: the series Our Writing Tools Take Part in the Forming of Our Thoughts explores the smartphone’s distinct language of iconic symbols which every user must learn to interact with through this device and its contents. Yet, as we interact with our touchscreens, we never physically touch the objects, people, and places we observe. “To point on this discrepancy, I create photographic works with haptic qualities that trigger the lust to touch. My works invite the beholder to look behind the rectangular surfaces with which screens and photo prints confront us. While architectural landscapes shape our analogue encounters, the layouts and icons of applications shape and limit our social interactions online. The network-like structures and semi-transparent qualities of the works echo how smartphone interactions have made us transparent.” In the series, Lesson1 The Algoritmic Gaze, she investigates how Algorithms “ look at” photographs.
Lilly Lulay questions us: a society that becomes transparent does not in fact become an increasingly secure society; rather the individual has only very narrow limits to freedom; and how algorithms transform our perception of reality?
Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs at night, using the available light cast by buildings in urban centers such as London, Tokyo and Los Angeles.
He has used the city and its urban development as an ostensible subject and chooses to engage deeply with the history of the photographic medium, experimenting with printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction. By referring to authors of anticipation literature such as JG Ballard or China Mieville, Antony Cairns explores the corners of an imaginary city where encounters do not appear. By printing his works and assembling them as montages on early computer punch cards – perhaps the earliest icon of the Information Age – and more recently by using the Electronik Ink or E-Ink *, Antony Cairns raises questions about the way in which urban fragmentation take hold of social bonds.
In Deconstructive Narrative, both artists implicitly present a very fine yet subtle vision of the transformation of today’s means of communication: the impact of virtual connectivity engendering possibly a fragmented world
