“According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together.” – Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” 1949
A two-person exhibition of work by Emily Henretta and Andrea Longacre-White, which explores the thingness of technology, its use and obsolescence, will open at 41 Orchard Street on Sunday 8 September from 6-8pm.
From computer screens to a burnt-out printer, Henretta mines the carcasses of outmoded technological components. The wall-based and freestanding assemblages that she creates with these materials are ad hoc constructions that seem to have indeterminate use value. Some have what may appear to be an interface. Others have the mordant charm of a monument to utopian ambition. For the exhibition, Henretta has made new woodblock prints on rice paper, which hang directly on the wall and evoke the topographical complexity of urban and electronic networks. Their wall-hanging scroll format is looped and cutaway at various points to reveal apertures; their circuitous interconnections and deep green palette allude to oversize motherboards.
Andrea Longacre-White will exhibit a single work from the artist’s ongoing “Pad Scan” series, made by capturing an image of an iPad on a flatbed scanner. As heat from the scanning light passes over and subsequently scrambles the iPad’s heat-sensitive display, a resultant abstraction emerges framed by a scrum of dust and smudged fingerprints. In describing “Untitled (retouch)” 2013, a large installation on view, the artist says, “While the Pad Scan attempts to pinpoint the technology of the now, a new site-specific floor sculpture argues for the impossibility of ever successfully doing so. This floor installation, consisting of paper and plaster iPad surrogates, creates a kind of past and future space, abstracting the technological object in an acknowledgment of its almost immediate obsolescence.”
Emily Henretta (b. 1982) received her MFA from Columbia University in 2011 where she received the Toby Devan Lewis award and an Emily Fisher Landau Fellowship. She has exhibited at The International Print Center New York, The Westside Gallery at The School of Visual Arts and The BRIC Rotunda Gallery.
Andrea Longacre-White (b. 1980) received her BA from Hampshire College and studied at Royal College of Art. She currently has work on view in the ICP Triennial and will present a solo booth in the Frame section of Frieze London in October. She is a recipient of the 2013 Rema Hort Mann Award, and recent exhibitions include Various Small Fires, Foxy Production, A Palazzo Gallery, LAXART, and The New Museum.
For downloadable exhibition material, click here.
