Ryan Kuo (SMACT ’14), ACT alumnus and current visual artist based in New York, was recently featured in Art in America, where he discussed his exhibit “The Pointer,” which was on view in the bitforms gallery in New York City from June 7 to August 5, 2018.
In a press release from the bitforms gallery:
“Kuo has developed three new software works for the bitforms gallery office, which for the first time will host a commissioned artist project. The Pointer is the illogical figure of whiteness, which American philosopher George Yancy describes as a “structural, ideological, embodied, epistemological and phenomenological mode of being.” Because its ascendancy is predicated on such notions as universality, neutrality, and purity, whiteness must isolate and obliterate barriers to its ideals while disavowing its own position. This also informs how software interfaces have come to be understood and used.
These interrelated works consider whiteness as an unremitting affective failure that erases bodies, including its own, in its search for a neutral point of origin. Rather than prescribe an answer, Kuo aims to materialize whiteness by redirecting its failure into recursive sequences, systems, and spaces.”
In Kuo’s interview with Art in America, he discusses his motivations in the creation of the exhibition, as well as his views on how his work corresponds with themes of global whiteness.
Kuo’s full interview can be read here.
