The final portion of “Unmonumental” will be presented online. “Montage: Unmonumental Online” will feature works by an international group of fourteen emerging and midcareer artists who appropriate diverse material from the Web to create new Internet-based montage. Cutting and pasting, breaking apart and re-assembling, ripping and remixing, the participating artists extend the radical practice of collage to the Internet, demonstrating how previously tried techniques can engender rich, new artistic practices. Their works incorporate varied formal elements: digital images, sound, video, or code, and also recite fictions and fantasies found online.
The Internet is a veritable theme park for commerce, popular entertainment, and self-marketing. Rather than dismiss this creative space for these reasons, the artists embrace these unique conditions. The logic behind the selection of the work argues that an artist’s engagement with this system and simultaneous refusal to entrench commerce is among the most powerful tactics available to them. The exhibition will be available online from February 15 to April 6, 2008 at rhizome.org/montage. Participating artists are:
Michael Bell-Smith
John Michael Boling
William Boling
Charles Broskoski
Jessica Ciocci
Petra Cortright
Chris Coy
Cao Fei
Kenneth Hung
Nina Katchadourian
Oliver Laric
Olia Lialina
Guthrie Lonergan
Paul Slocum
“Montage: Unmonumental Online” is organized by Lauren Cornell, Director, and Marisa Olson, Editor and Curator at Large, of the New Museum’s affiliate Rhizome.
"Montage: Unmonumental Online" will be accompanied by a mini-catalogue that includes a curatorial statement by Cornell and Olson as well as artists’ biographies and reproductions of their work.