25.05 – 20.07.2024

“ […] citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

Billie Clarken using images from mass culture, she points out the paradoxes of projected identity, in search of inauthenticity and the associated spectacle refers to the condition of society in late capitalism. She acquires and utilizes appropriated digital memory by creating a certain set of data, a network of representations liberated from the tyranny of representation. Clarken is not only referring to the status of images distanced or detached from their source, but more importantly to cultural constructs. The artist becomes a user of images, materializing and fetishizing the satirical representation of the immortal image by punctuating the meanings which the culture producing it has secondarily bestowed upon it.