"Raster Raster," a group exhibition curated by Marisa Olson, will open Friday at Aran Cravey Gallery in Los Angeles. In case you aren't familiar with Olson, she's an acclaimed artist, whose works combine performance, video, drawing, installation, the Internet, and technology in general. Back in 2004, for instance, she actually auditioned for American Idol and blogged about the process as a work of art. Likewise, the latest exhibition she has curated also brilliantly merges technology and art.
The name of the exhibition "Raster Raster" is a play on the words "faster, faster!"—reflective of the featured artists' enthusiasm and lyrical style—and it's also a reference to a graphic design term commonly associated with image production.
While any graphic designer may know "rasterizing" an image to mean scanning and converting an image into pixels for presentation, the curator and artists behind "Raster Raster" interpreted the word a little differently. The exhibition, which features a range of artists from New York, L.A., Berlin, and Lahore, Pakistan, sees 11 artists scanning the world around them and presenting their reflections and observations through art. Thus, with the way the world has evolved in recent years thanks to the Internet, it's only expected that the Internet plays a large role in their art, too. In fact, the works to be displayed at Aran Cravey can very well be deemed "Post-Internet art," which is a term Olson coined.
"This is work that one might call 'art after the Internet’ ... That is, work that simultaneously enjoys and critiques the Internet, responding to and incorporating its tropes, memes, cultural politics, and visual language into forms that may or may not live online," Olson said.
Raster Raster opens Feb. 22 and will be on view until April 12, 2014 at Aran Cravey Gallery.
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