Siebren Verstag

Max Protetch

A Conscious Web 2.0 Dissenter
It’s safe to assume that artist Siebren Verstag, whose work deals with the overwhelming amount of information in our lives, was not swept up in the Web 2.0 frenzy that pulsed through the MSM and the blogosphere this past year. Nothing Was, his solo exhibition at Max Protetch gallery in New York, takes a considerably more suspect approach to the increase of content online. ‘Time Waits For No One’ (2007) presents Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year issue with the word ‘No’ written in black marker over the cover’s reflective surface — designed to honor the digital everyman or, officially, ‘You.’ The marker, which also selectively crosses out other text on the page, playfully inscribes the persistence of an ego-driven culture onto a rallying cry for a new kind of ‘digital democracy.â’ One of two generative videos, ‘As The World Turns’ (2006) features the artist chain-smoking at a small table and holding up cue cards onto which the daily synopsis of the eponymous Americ! an soap opera is live-fed. ‘Something for Everyone’ (2007), one of multiple prints in the show, features 300,000 Google image results that appear like colorful specks in landscape that stretches on and on. Here, as in the rest of the works, the artist questions what is gained, and also what is lost, in a culture in which visual information, and the sharing of it, is proliferating daily. – Lauren Cornell

via rhizome news