Past Exhibition

Kiki Seror

Hysteresis

May 19 – June 23, 2013
Artist Reception: Sunday, May 19, 5 – 7 p.m.

Upcoming Performance: Hysteresis--A Social Teleaction, Sunday, June 23, 2013, 6 – 7 p.m.

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present Kiki Seror’s first LA solo exhibition, Hysteresis. Kiki Seror incorporates aspects of contemporary technology, sexual politics, language, and feminist perspectives on history. The artist is a devoted experimentalist who strives to address edgy topics with visual presentations and installations that are sleek and technologically polished. The exhibition will be on view May 19 – June 23, 2013. A reception for the artist will be held on Sunday, May 19, 2013, 5 – 7 p.m.

Kiki Seror’s work in Hysteresis asks, “How do we create communities? How do we create ourselves?” The photographs, based on animated GIFs, and her Chatroulette performance videos allow the viewer to envision a virtual sub-culture that far outreaches our in-home battles with loneliness and isolation. It seems to fall farther from surveillance art and closer to meditations on gender, self, identity and community. Her aesthetic is that of porn and video diaries heavily laden with sexual, personal, emotional and visceral elements that are so often shunned with that behind- the-curtain mentality. Seror intends to open that curtain for all to see.

The three videos in the exhibition use a bricolage of software and the interactive, improvisational play and online installation questions and subverts the roles of the self and the “other” in the present real time context of human relations within an eroding “natural” world and an overwhelmingly decentralized domain --- where physical and digital realities overlap. Both the videos and the photographs in the exhibition juxtapose public and private, sexuality and technology, creating a complex visual world driven by a graphic and unashamed feminist sensibility that dares to trespass into realms of inquiry typically represented through a male perspective; to challenge viewers’ preconceptions about gender, sexuality, desire, and the body.

The GIF photographs communicate cultural concepts through characterized gesture and inter- textual association, through the character, in some sense, “miming” him or herself. The GIF accomplishes this function by reproducing the same gesture to respond to different contexts. In this way, GIFs divorce themselves from the realm of celebrity to create enough traction to hedge out their own ideological space. GIF fame is not located in an interest in the personal lives of the characters it adopts, but rather in the proliferation and reproduction of images that continue to reinvent meaning.

A visual artist working with digital media, throughout her career Seror has sought to explore the binary dynamics between male/female and text/image as opposite genders. By means of photography, video, sculpture and installations her aim is to translate rapture and imagination by creating computerized topography and tantalizing images that enlist desire, but take the viewer no further than the initial illusion allows.

Kiki Seror’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, curated by Louis Grachos. Past solo show venues include I-20 Gallery, New York; Apex Art, New York; the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna; and Nils Staerk Contemporary, Copenhagen. Seror's work has been included in group exhibitions such as Don Juan, Vienna Kunsthalle (2006); Jeugen von heute, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2006); Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art, curated by Michael Rush, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2005); In Focus: Themes in Photography, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2005); typ0, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2004); Strangers: First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2003).

• Additional Exhibition Images
• Installation Images