Amadeo Art Studio 2020-present

A 3D print of pepe frog rides around on a roomba playing an interpretation of ‘The Rainbow Connection’ by Kermit the Frog.

He is a ghostly white for the most part, save for his red lips. Noticebly, in the center of his lips, there is a heart shape in the negative space of the paint work. Between this and the use of the ‘prince’ in the title we recall the myth of the princess and the frog, that the princess must kiss the frog in order for him to be transformed back into a prince. This takes trust, and intimacy with something repulsive.

His arm is also red, in a composition that mimics that of Pierre Huyghe’s dog with a pink leg.

This dog named ‘human’ lives in Huyghe’s exhibtions and there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the ethics of the animal’s use in exhibitions.

This redness also invokes ideas of guilt ‘blood on your hands’ ‘out damned spot’ It also acts as an arm band, fascistic in nature. it’s unclear what the message is, its there to confuse, to send people in circles. People’s own politics are brought into question as they contend with the work.

He rides around aimless, lost in the gallery space, he sings the Rainbow connection. A beautiful song about chasing ‘the dream’ as it is co opted and used to manipulate through a misleading ideology.  Following the lineage between Kermit as a mostly pure romantic lamenting the loss of inocence and encouraging the cultivation of hope within that - to this more tumultous frog who’s meaning seems to fluctuate along with the whims of the internet.

This cluster of signs and symbols form a network that trancends the borders of politics but all talk to the idea of the contingent nature of language. Is pepe losing his colour, or in the process of becoming red? Do we need to come erotically close with the opposition in order to fully concquer it as Berardi says? Where do we place hope and rehabilitation in this maelstrom of information and ideology? it can seem aimless.futile at times.

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection

Amber 2022 - Sorcha Ashworth, Amadeo Grosman,  Single channel video

Very important work for the development of my practice, furthering collaborative relationship with Sorcha. It felt very much like we really hit something with this work. It wove in our shared ideas in a way that I find very subtle and sophisticated. Banality is fused with monumental imagery to create a hypnotic spectacle out of nothing at all. An aimless figure in an otherworldly location being subject to nondescript discourse regarding an unknown person. We don’t really know if the figure in the video is speaking or being spoken about, we don’t know why she’s in a pool full of orange liquid. But leaving that mystery allows for this endlessly intriguing experience despite the re use of clips over and over again. 

This is a trick we end up using frequently in our collaborations. in Its Almost Painless, the video remains reppetitive while the score underneath changes over time to offer different readings and combinations of feeling.  In amber we re use the same footage while we change the text

Amber brings together works from Elsie Christoffel, Amadeo Grosman, and Sorcha Ashworth, as they probe at the vicarious networks that constitute our late capital climate. 

Between stop and go there is a fire, a pause, a golden hour. 

I really love almost all of Balenciaga’s recent efforts in their collections and subsequent branding exercises. They conveniently inhabit that frustratingly comfortable space of critique of capitalism where they know and satirize it so well that they are inevitably enabled and consumed by it.

This campaign in particular echoes a lot of the aesthetics and ideas I’ve been thinking about lately. The highbrow / lowbrow collision. The insistence on consumerism and culture being inseperable even as the world collapses around us.

To me this set of videos advertising the clothes was a perfect example of how critique and consumerism have married in a frustrating way.

Deeply inspired by old sci fi posters, gig flyers, cartoons, manga. Art that exists in popular culture as opposed to the potentially more ‘sophisticated’ contemporary art world. 

Has meticulously developed a style since childhood. 

Drifting after artschool, uninspired. 

Making gig posters for a music scene meant that her art existed in the spaces of her actual community. 

drawing full time.

HyperNormalisation - Adam Curtis Interesting overview of the rise of neoliberalism, individualismm how reality and fiction became blurred as a result of millitiristic imperatives.  an interesting point made when curtis describes a very early program that acted like a therapist to the user simply by regurgitating what was being said back to the user. This kind of program didn’t understand what the user was saying, it was not AI, rather a parody of the ideals of AI. Anyone that used this program immediately became engrossed in it, sharing hyper specific intimate details about their life. This therapist didnt condascend or threaten the user. Curtis notes that in the age of individualism, what made people feel most secure was seeing themselves reflected back on them, exactly like looking in the mirror.  This changed the course of the pursuit of AI via a detour toward feedback loops. this ordered the world with the user at the center, but had the added bonus of being the perfect honeytrap for the extraction of value. The manufacturing of desire and the promise of fulfilling those same desires. In the age of the anxious individual, a system that reflects the individual is reasurring. 

- Talks about the concerted effort to manipulate the dissemination of news media as a means of constructing a narrative to justify the invasion of the middle east, to cause unrest among the middle east. It tells the tale of the birth  of the post truth era

-talks about a russian technologist called Vladislav Serkov, originally from the theatre world. What he did was to apply avante garde ideas from theatre into pollitics and economics in order to undermine the public perception of what was real and what was not.  Serkov funded many opposing extreme pollitical groups and then made it known that this is what he was doing. No one knew what was real or fake in modern russia. “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused. A ceasless shapeshifter that is unstoppable because it was indefinable. 

I’ve been thinking a little bit about why I love rap lyrics so much, and why the use of word play is really important in my work. Traditionally, we learn in schools that a similie is used to connect two distinct ideas into something that connotes a deeper kind of meaning. I’ll use this lyric by Leonard Cohen as an example:

“You held on to me like I was a crucifix”  Here we understand that a crucifix is held in times of need, in times of desperation, in times of prayer, they are clutched tightly for protection and assurance. Connecting this connotation to the way one holds a lover creates this really beautiful image. It produces a meaning more profound than something like “you held on to me tightly/desperately/lovingly” 

However often times in rap lyrics, similies make a connection that by traditional measures might read as sloppy or ineffective. Take this lyric from Drake: 

“Like a job straight out of High School there’s no you and I” 

Here “you and I” is a homophone of “U.N.I.,” as in “university”—people who start working right after high school haven’t gone to university yet. But beyond this word play there is no deeper connotation. What does getting a job straight out of high school have to do with there being no relationship between Drake and who ever it is he is talking about? Nothing really. This happens quite a lot in rap, a connection is made between two things seemingly on a purely aesthetic basis. Some might put this down to poor writing, but I think there is something more interesting going on here. 

These lines express an exuberant unpredictability which defy the conventions of poetic language. They are playful, and priotize the creativity of the initial connection over concern to adhere to the normal ways in which literary devices are used. While there may not be a strong initial connection between two ideas in the traditional sense, meaning is still conveyed in the shear creativity of the connection in a way that I find quite radical and precisely unique to hip hop.