Master Series
A Solo Exhibition of Works by Anthony Warnick
Statement
I view the world in terms of systems. My practice makes the viewer aware of the systems - information, social, and technological - within which we operate. I take an information dense system like the news and through repositioning components reveal the mechanism of the system. My current body of work engages the torrent of news flooding over us on an hourly basis. The core strategy of the work is abstraction to bring the structure of news delivery into focus. Through distortion and pattern, the content recedes, revealing only the operation of the system itself. Exemplifying this is the work Dot Dot Dot, a video of cable news clips in which anchors and guests are swapped for swirling dots. This work literalizes the criticism that cable news stimulates without informing. The work literally and figuratively flattens the coverage to form devoid of depth.
I borrow the forms; treating art history as a database, retrieving and restoring for future creation. The use of borrowed forms can be most clearly seen in 15 24-Hour News Sources, which remixes Christian Marclay’s 48 War Movies expanding and refocusing Marclay’s ideas by presenting the live news all at once in a cacophonous excess. This intentional remaking highlights the collaborative production of culture.
In the studio, I play with words as often as objects, and through combination and combustion, a poetics emerges. I present these experiments to the viewer perennially as stacks of everything from pixels to paper. This too is a form of abstraction such as the erasure paired with categorization present in the procedurally generated headlines from my work Mad Libs. This work takes many forms from one off prints to a web app each produced by custom software which ingests the top headlines from the New York Times and returns custom Mad Libs.
By placing things (language, material, and concept) in a constellation of connections, an indirect view of our social systems appears, enabling us to see our position within it like a fish viewing water for the first time.
BIO
Anthony Warnick lives and works in Manhattan, Kansas. He is a multidisciplinary artist who engages with the intersection of social systems and capital. Warnick holds a M.F.A in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and a B.F.A. from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Web + Multimedia Environments. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Art at Kansas State University. He has been an Art(its) On the Verge Fellow and worked in New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center.
He works at the intersection of digital media and sculpture producing works in media as varied as film, porcelain, and software. These works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions and group shows in both the United States and internationally at such institution as Katherine E. Nash Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), SPACES Gallery (Cleveland, OH), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit, MI), Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, MI) and FaveLAB (Athens, Greece) and Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec).
His work has been supported in the form of grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, The Hopper Award (Shortlist), and an Ohio Arts Council. Additionally, Warnick has attended residency at SOMA (Mexico City), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), FaveLAB (Athens, Greece), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), and Futurefarmers (San Francisco, CA). His works are in public and private collections including University of St. Thomas Artist Books Collection (St. Paul, MN), Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro, NC), and the Cranbrook Museum of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI).