Various Small Fires is pleased to present Passionaries, American artist Gina Beavers’ first solo exhibition in Asia and her first exhibition with VSF. In Seoul, the artist will present eight new paintings that look at contemporary Internet culture and social phenomena to consider themes that include consumerism, celebrity fandom, global media circulation, image consumption and manipulation, as well as the creation and distortion of the self.
Beavers’ practice is rooted in the archiving of digital imagery with many hours spent scouring online resources such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Google. In recent years, Beavers has most commonly used makeup tutorial videos, snapshots of celebrities, and photos of so-called “#foodporn,” a common Internet hashtag, as source material that is both internationally wide ranging yet culturally repetitious. Passionaries seeks to find and emphasize common ground between American and Korean audiences: her paintings Gilgeori Toast and Korean Fried Chicken, for example, all document Instagram photos of Korean-American street food that are extremely well-circulated beyond their geographic boundaries. To create her highly tactile, almost photo-realist works, Beavers applies layer after layer of acrylic paint, which she subsequently carves.
#foodporn images are styled to present food at its seductive, gluttonous best. These performative photos originated in Asia, and Passionaries returns this genre of photo-making to its source. Yet Beavers’ sculptural paintings also undermine the flatness of the Instagrammed images her work otherwise carefully replicates, playing with questions of the representation of “reality” on social media. A burger rendered carefully in acrylic by Beavers comes no closer to the original plated piece of food than a photo on Instagram.
