- Matthew Lawson Garrett
Artists: Tiffany Sia, Kobby Adi, Jackie Karuti
Today’s media environment is one defined by constant motion. Images come at us from all angles, their speed obfuscating their vectors of movement. Although these images move through seemingly invisible paths this movement is material, leaving traces on both the images themselves and the space through which they travel.
The Appearance of Distance is an exhibition featuring artists whose work addresses the materiality of images and the relationship between their movement and the space through which they circulate. Works by Tiffany Sia, Kobby Adi, and Jackie Karuti respond to today’s media environment by introducing frictions, revealing how the movement of images within apparently ethereal networks leave material traces on both the surface of images and the physical landscapes through which they pass.
Sia’s video works appropriated found footage and recorded online livestreams of landscapes. What Rules The Invisible takes images of Hong Kong seen through the sojourner’s distanced gaze and pairs them with an oral history of the region told by the artist’s mother. Using found amateur travelogue footage from the 1930–70s, the film contends that it is absent, invisible, and unseeable images that most potently attend to the “ghostly presences” of history. Antipodes II and III (2024), consisting of recorded twenty-four-hour streams of landscapes from Okinawa and Kinmen inset in rearview mirrors, evoke various specters of infrastructure while revealing a national investment in the landscape image. Karuti’s interrelated video works, Site Visit I and II (2023) and Expressway (2023), film the landscape as a crime scene, implicating structures such as the highway in unequally increasing the speed of life in urban space. Adi’s work uses circulatory networks themselves as a medium through which to materialize his films. In Cloisters (2023–24), footage of rotting fruit and the ecosystem it creates were exposed on fresh and degenerating 16mm film stock. hold (2021)—a 16mm film transferred to DVD—must be taken home to be viewed, creating new networks of circulation and allowing the possibility that the work may be lost, stolen, or destroyed. A new high-resolution scan of Cloisters will be shown, revealing the damage that it accumulated during its previous exhibition in New York.
The Appearance of Distance is accompanied by a publication featuring a conversation with Tiffany Sia and writer Ed Halter.
