I’m excited to announce
2021–ongoing

 During the (ongoing) COVID-19 pandemic, many museums and galleries closed to the public and turned to “online only” shows as a means of sustaining their exhibition programs. This new format of exhibiting physical works in virtual space and the audience’s increasing proclivity towards digital technologies for their “consumption” of art (and almost all other kinds of information) have created fissures that allow me to hack into prestigious institutions and coveted exhibition opportunities. Taking advantage of Instagram’s geotagging tool and Google’s image crowdsourcing feature, I assert my work into otherwise inaccessible contexts. In doing so, I render the presence of my work “in” these “spaces” as virtually indiscernible from the presence of those few elite artists and artworks that are extended an invitation IRL.

I’m excited to announce serves as an institutional critique at the same time as it holds a lens to society-at-large. The work draws from “fake news” culture. While my intention is not to make my audience the butt of a joke, I am interested in problematizing the way information is consumed via social media. In much of my work, I am interested in blurring the lines between what is real and what is not. With this artwork in particular, I am interested in how we as social media users play an active role in crafting alternate realities in these virtual spaces while, at the same time, ignoring others’ fabrications and accepting what is presented as fact without further interrogation. Through performative social media engagement, I attempt to illuminate this information literacy deficit. In this case, the deficit results in innocuous, unearned congratulatory messages. In much worse cases, that same information literacy deficit results in a distrust of science, for example—a contemporary cultural phenomenon that has real, detrimental impacts on both people and planet.