Paige K. B.

Lives and works in New York

Artist statement

A driving concern of my practice as an artist who writes is the paradox of how to read an artwork given the historically attendant parameters of form, content, and context at a time of digital circulation, ahistorical discourse, and context collapse. When anything I make will be turned into a JPEG, TIFF, or PDF, the discrete artwork is demoted to the status of information, which is essentially unstable, lacking in currency—a facet of the experience of contingency that is contemporary life and art. Complex information or even people tend to be simplified for consumption or legibility, which has a corollary in the compression of rich-data, high-resolution images into low-res, circulating ones. Such a situation has led me to combine recognizable, even cliché symbols with textual excerpts in accretive paintings, drawings, and sculptural combinations. This approach is meant to undermine each imported element’s prior meaning or charge the lack thereof with new implications. At times I make multiple works in different mediums—e.g. photography and digitally printed fabric—based on the same source image. The tactile and handmade qualities of my work belie its range of plastic references. By re-rendering and rewriting, I elide the difference between personal and found material, feelings and structural reality. If, for example, I’m drawn to a fictional character, e.g., the flame-haired Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion, then I juxtapose that personal identification with an...

Artwork