Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

Curated by Chelsea Hopper

22 Sep - 9 Oct 2021

Bryan Foong, Brian Fuata, Alex Hobba, Tim Palman, Chunxiao Qu, Sarah Rodigari

Person, woman, man, camera, TV brings together newly commissioned work by six emerging and established artists who investigate the politics of speaking, representations of power, displaying performative authoritarian identities and ultimately ask how the boundaries blur between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ within our current political and media landscapes.

This idea for this exhibition began with the phrase Person, woman, man, camera, TV referred to by U.S. President Donald Trump several times in a Fox News interview with Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University on July 22, 2020. Trump described the difficulty of a cognitive test he took and was bizarrely insistent about how particularly good he was at the memory portion of the exam. Trump’s repeated phrase has since gone viral on social media; it was quickly transformed into internet memes, was parodied by celebrities, and turned into merchandise.

The exhibition, however, is not about Donald Trump.

What I'm interested in is our situation of post-truth/truth/disinformation/fake news, of cognitive dissonance, and of spoken and written language displayed and performed by people in positions of power. Person, woman, man, camera, TV asks about the boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ as it appears in the work of these six artists. Their experimental narratives allow us to rethink our present time and our ability to imagine a different future and ask: what future do we want to see ‘performed’?

IMAGE | Chunxiao Qu, Untitled, 2019, 128cm x 32.3cm, led neon and wire with transparent acrylic suspension frames. Courtesy of the artist.