[spectre] Cloud Banks - the new exhibition by Mark Amerika at Kasa Gallery

[Lanfranco Aceti]

http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2013/09/cloud-banks/

Cloud Banks, the new exhibition by Mark Amerika at Kasa Gallery,  will
coincide with another of Mark Amerika’s exhibitions titled
Precipitations at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, continuing the
aesthetic analysis of the theme of Art and Economics.

Cloud Banks at Kasa Gallery will explore the way artists, political
and economic theorists, metaphysical philosophers, and businessmen use
language as a tool to construct their vision of the world as they see
it. As with much of Amerika’s conceptual net art, the title is a pun,
one that refers to both a weather phenomenon – a layer of clouds seen
from a distance – and the recent rise of both cloud computing and
too-big-to-fail banking systems.

Amerika has taken numerous texts from authors such as Immanuel Kant,
John Ruskin, P. T. Barnum, Andy Warhol, Raoul Vaneigem, Karl Marx,
John Stuart Mill, and various documents produced by Conceptual artists
of the 1960s, to produce experimental tag clouds that reveal both the
writer’s use of language and the thematic subjects they obsessed over.
Amerika then cleverly manipulates the tag clouds by mashing up some of
the texts for aesthetic and political effect. For example, in the show
at Kasa Gallery, two of the works on exhibit mashup Conceptual art
documents with John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy out
of which emerge a subset of tag clouds titled Conceptual Art Mill.

This post-structuralist and postmodern approach to contemporary art
introduces multilayered issues on the blending of image and text that
create a series of relationships indicative of the current struggle to
preserve old definitions and hierarchies, which are increasingly
unable to explain the current socio-political upheavals in an economic
context that is increasingly deteriorating. Amerika’s textual
juxtapositions oblige the viewer to read and re-interpret the meaning
that the visual proposes in light of instinctive word associations.
This is not solely an exercise of ‘viewing’ but a conceptual
re-interpretation of textual historical inheritance, ideological
arguments and conflicting realities.

Clouds obscure and diffuse the light of the sun, much as banks obscure
and confuse the effects of contemporary financial realities.  The
clouded visuality of the words in Amerika’s artworks becomes a way to
let the viewer perceive the clouded visuality of the world. Cloud
Banks is the representation of a human failure to understand,
reconnect and re-contextualize histories, ideologies and contemporary
realities.

Mark Amerika’s work becomes more than a conceptual collage: it is a
hymn to human failure, to the impossibility of seeing as the viewers’
gaze is obscured and obstructed by the ‘cloud banks’ that surround us.
This is a world of undecipherable constructions, contradictions,
multiplicities and vagueness. A world of tenuous connections that, by
impeding a clear vision, leads the viewers into abuse and
exploitation.

Senior Curator: Lanfranco Aceti. Curators: Ozden Sahin.

Exhibition Dates: September 27 – October 31, 2013.

Address: Kasa Galeri Bankalar Cad. No: 2, Karakoy, Istanbul.

Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 every day except Sunday.

Notes on the Artist and the Artworks

Mark Amerika’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such
as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center.
In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens,
Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition
entitled UNREALTIME. He is the author of many books including
remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 — remixthebook.com)
and his collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital
Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007).

His latest art work, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics [glitchmuseum.com],
was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the
London 2012 Olympics. Amerika is a Professor of Art and Art History at
the University of Colorado at Boulder and Principal Research Fellow in
the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at La Trobe University.
More information can found at his website, markamerika.com and at his
twitter feed @markamerika.

Lanfranco Aceti http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com
Director and Founder OCR http://www.ocradst.org
Director and Founder MoCC http://www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org
Editor in Chief Leonardo Electronic Almanac http://www.leoalmanac.org
Director, Kasa Gallery http://kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu/

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