Image Atrophy

Andrew Beck

Bowerbank Ninow
Level 9, 14/10 Lorne St, Auckland

8 – 24 August 2019

Opening Thursday 8 August from 6:00pm

Bowerbank Ninow presents Image Atrophy by Andrew Beck and Something other, held in common by Hannah Valentine, featuring works from the estate of Toss Woollaston.

This opening marks the launch of our new 400 square meter penthouse premises that has yet to be open to the public. Join us on Level 9 from 6pm as we celebrate what we have achieved over the past four years and look towards the future.

Espresso Martinis by Scapegrace Gin and Coffee Supreme NZ, mulled wine by Metro Magazine NZ Restaurant of the Year finalist Coco's Cantina Restaurant & Bar, beer by Brothers Beer, and steamed buns from our new downstairs neighbours Sunny Town

Combining digitally generated images with traditional chemical photographic printing processes, Andrew Beck produces fractured, dispersed entities that play on the idea of the art object as a body, a corporeal form subject to degradation and decay. He relates this to the status of the digital image, itself an uneasy passenger that becomes diffuse and unclear through its iterative versioning and reproduction. The title, Image Atrophy, refers to this concept of an image breaking up, losing its fidelity, becoming noisy and uncertain.

Beck’s process of collaging and recombining his images invites comparisons to the polymorphic, amorphous nature of internet image repositories such as Google Image Search and Instagram. In these chaotic virtual libraries, the individuality of the image is brought into question as each entry bleeds and folds into those around it, becoming lost in a deluge of information that approaches the status of chaos.

As a way of thinking through the implications of the digital fragmentation of images, Beck has created several works that refer to the Boids computer simulation, a 1980s program designed to model the way flocks of animals move together. Beck uses these works to visualise the constantly growing and changing multitude of digital images circulating online, a formless mass moving and flowing but never assuming a settled form.

Deploying references to retro-futurist aesthetics drawn from ’90s digital culture, Beck suggests that in these fever-dream visions of unconsummated futures, there are points of slippage and ambiguity that shed light on contemporary anxieties and dilemmas.