Yael Kanarek. Kisses Kisses

About

This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Since 1994, Kanarek has developed a multimedia narrative and all of its constituent parts––spanning net art, painting, sculpture, performance, and musical composition––ultimately creating a world unto itself. This is the World of Awe. Previously exhibited as a series of browser-based chapters, Kisses Kisses presents twenty years of world-making as a holistic installation, including ephemera and never before seen paintings.

The narrative of World of Awe is conveyed through a lone traveler searching for lost treasure. Anonymous, androgynous, and somewhere between amorphous and human, the traveler is depicted in Kanarek’s paintings from the early nineties, and is the guiding voice in the browser-based works. Crossing through a portal at 419 E 6th Street in Manhattan, the traveler enters into a virtual desert in a perpetual state of dawn and dusk. Throughout World of Awe, we continuously find ourselves confronted with such binaries: digital and analogue, virtual and real, masculine and feminine, fine art and craft, fact and fiction. Rooted in the emergence of internet culture in the nineties, World of Awe is a reflection on the rapidly changing landscape brought about by digital networked technologies at that time. For as radical as the accessibility of the internet was in the early nineties, a generation has now come of age during its earliest years and through its most recent developments. This calls for the latest iteration ofWorld of Awe,which manifests as Kisses Kisses. Across media and time, this body of work negotiates what it means to move, live, and long in the Information Age. On the occasion of the exhibition, a fanzine with an essay by Doran and a conversation between Kanarek and co-curator Dylan Kerr will be published. Jennifer Dalton’s 1997 essay “Yael Kanarek’s Love Letters from a World of Awe” will be republished with an addendum by Doran and Kanarek.

–– Kerry Doran