[ISEA2015] Artist Statement: Marisa Olson — Blue Sky

Artist Statement

Video sculpture (2015)

Blue Sky offers a feminist critique of disruption as a corporate meme. Working under the umbrella of contemporary tech industry jargon in which the phrase “blue sky” invites a proposal for a big picture of the world as disrupted by a new product, Blue Sky is a video sculpture housed in the gilded carcass of an obsolete Mac computer tower. The video’s tension between intervention and cheery papercraft play speaks to the paradox of disruption as connecting equally to rupture and fauxutopian progress. Subtly evoking the mythology of Apple’s DIY, homebrew, new-age origins, the video features the artist in a studio environment working to create a handmade blue sky inside the backdrop of a seamless bluescreen paper roll. The work alludes to Second Wave feminist crafts, ultimately producing as a final form a gradient pixel-weaving that is adorned with cottony clouds.

  • Marisa Olson’s interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate(s) Modern + Liverpool, the Nam June Paik Art Center, British Film Institute, Sundance Film Festival, and Performa Biennial. Her work has been commissioned and collected by the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Center for Photography, the Experimental Television Center, and PS122, and has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, the New York Times, Liberation, the Guardian, Art21, the Globe & Mail, Interview Magazine, Folha de Sao Paolo, and elsewhere. She is currently a Visiting Critic at RISD. Lecture on video: WellWellWell, postinternet (art) & network culture

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