Chase Barnes

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Our reality is shaped by invisible, diffuse systems operating beyond human scale. Central to my work is a common effort to visualize the strange, austere, and abstract character of our time. Photography enables us to montage and correlate otherwise discrete and separate visual concepts, and it's through this sequencing that these works endeavor to image the real, felt effects of hyperobjects– capital, the internet, artificial intelligence– at a time where we must collectively negotiate their consequences and locate our agency relative to them. 'Stateless' traces how contemporary life is increasingly defined by the efficiencies of technological and commercial institutions, and the social desolation that follows in their wake. Photographed in the liminal and contested spaces of the current American epoch, the work invokes notions of territory, sovereignty, and citizenship at a time where our attention and power is increasingly delocated, revealing a void that emerges in the wake of convenience and digital frictionlessness. Interspersed between these documentary images are cameraless abstractions— compositions generated by chance when a corrupted Photoshop document miscommunicated with a failing graphics card. These images, irrational and unprompted, interrupt the logic of generative AI and algorithmic prediction, insisting on error, failure, and accident as counterpoints to efficiency. Together, the two sets of images construct an essayistic meditation on our slippage...

Artwork