Ken Okiishi: gesture/data

Looking at them for a long time…
That could be enough-that looking and thinking and having that experience.

Ken Okiishi takes up and troubles the vocabulary of the media that he uses. His works hover over and within the relationships between matter and memory, perception and action of a digitally networked culture. Using video, performance, and installation he creates moments when language and images begin to fall apart. As Okiishi subverts the material claims of the media, the glitches that occur illuminate spaces for the production of something other than what has already been.

For gesture/data Okiishi brings together a new set of HD flatscreen television works and wallpaper. The series gesture/data considers the formal properties and the traces of sources of stored memory, along with the new ways we have of reading memory and images through gestures. The video layer of the flatscreens contain two types of footage, the first being old home VHS tapes of recorded television shows that Okiishi has corrupted further by re-recording over parts of the tape with new digitally broadcasted television. The general breakdown of the magnetic particles in the VHS tapes, combined with the transfer of the footage to USB for playback, has resulted in a glitchy, colour-rich layer of video that jitters between 1990-present. The flatscreens themselves become an abstract support surface that hovers between the VHS footage and the interference paint, which Okiishi applies directly on the screen while the video is playing.

In the second type of video footage Okiishi looks at moments of rupture, in being and language, of a space that is a digital void. The video is a HD recording of a BARCO TV screen running a standard blue void as it fails to register a signal from a media input. As the camera scans over the screen the proto-pixels of the monitor fly out and hover in "honeycomb" formations of various intensities, qualities, and ranges of blue. Adopting the cinematic/video technique of chroma-key or "green screen" Okiishi paints over the blue video in chroma green and blue paints-a gesture that brings the digital void further forward to the support surface of the flatscreen.

Ken Okiishi lives and works in New York and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (2013); Mathew, Berlin (2012); Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (2012); Alex Zachary, New York (2010); and Mehringdamm 72, Berlin (2010). Recent group exhibitions include: Artists Space, New York (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013); Kunsthalle Bern (2012); White Columns, New York (2012); GAMeC, Bergamo (2012).