Contributed by Chunbum Park / At Picture Theory in Chelsea, Elias Wessel has assembled provocative installations titled “It’s Complicated” and, with composer and musician Natalia Kiёs, “Systems at Play.“ In “It’s Complicated,” busy photographs that document surfing and scrolling behavior stand on pedestals. Holstered at their sides are headphones piping cacophonic sounds and words – styled “Is Possibly Art” – that AI-based text-recognition software has distilled from the long-exposure images.
Wessel’s images bear more than a passing resemblance to Gerhard Richter’s paintings, which feature accumulated layers of paint horizontally smudged to create dramatic and evocative blurs of visual output. Wessel’s photographs represent a fog of information from narrative texts and statements, videos, pictures, emojis, and other digitally transmitted phenomena. The true and the false, the relevant and the meaningless all blend together and may be indistinguishable to the user.
Wessel’s pedestal-based compositions also embody the tension between the physical and the virtual, and the analog and digital. He highlights the potential incompatibility and untranslatability between these dichotomous realms, notwithstanding the fanciful wish of many a gamer or mere daydreamer that real and imagined worlds could merge or at least become reciprocally permeable. Insofar as Wessel’s work acknowledges the possibility that no coherent meaning may emerge from the artificial processing that digital media involves, he registers a sidelong look at presumptively enlightening labels like “interdisciplinary,” “multisensory,” and “experimental,” which may not advance one’s understanding much at all.
In “Systems at Play,” Wessel and Kiёs have rendered the crude audio output of “Is Possibly Art” rhythmic and animated, diminishing the discordance that text-to-speech software yields when combining disorganized and substantially unfiltered data. In this context. social media become less detectable. The two exhibitions together illuminate the insidious commercial and ideological influences that compete for our attention and belief. They are frequently absurd: an advertisement for a weight-loss program could appear next to a commercial promoting greasy hamburgers. In conjuring social media into art objects that phase out our attachment to and reliance on them, Wessel, with Kiёs, allows us to see them more clearly as tools of seductive but not necessarily constructive or benevolent actors.
“Elias Wessel: It’s Complicated” and “Elias Wessel and Natalia Kiёs: Systems at Play,” Picture Theory, 548 West 28th Street, New York, NY. Through September 7, 2024.
About the author: Chunbum Park completed their master’s thesis at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has exhibited artwork at the SVA Chelsea Gallery. Park is the founder of the Emerging Whales Collective, an online community for artists.
