‘KODAK’, Andrew Norman Wilson's most recent video work, articulates the will to accumulate and preserve things - people, objects, technologies, buildings, intellectual property, companies, images, memories - across time, emphasizing how these things consolidate and disperse, are materialized and then digitized, and come into light and then cease to be visible.
Unique to 'KODAK' is that it’s told entirely from a blind person’s point of view: the sounds one hears are what Rich, the protagonist, hears (and says) in real time; and what one sees are internal associative memories and fantasies.
Grounded by a three-act narrative, in a reversal of docudrama form, the imagery begins with faded archival collage and ends in vivid computer-generated 3D models. This psychic-material shift from memory based on photographic archives to digitally composed fantasies suggests a broader technological shift - the subsumption of the modern analog contingency of photography into digital postproduction and a return of the tableau of Western historical painting through a wholly constructed digital “realism.”
'KODAK' is coproduced by The Stolbun Collection, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Center for Contemporary Art Futura (Prague), and KRIEG (Hasselt).
Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles. His videos and installations address a heady rush of images, technology, and bodies caught in the streams of circulation and representation that our era demands.
Recent exhibitions include Techne and the Decency of Means at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2017), Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), the Gwangju Biennial (2016), the Berlin Biennial (2016), the Bucharest Biennial (2016), Bread and Roses at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2016), and On Sweat, Paper and Porcelain at CCS Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2015). He has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University, UCLA, and Cooper Union. His work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Buzzed, Frieze, Gizmodo/Gawker, The New Yorker, and Wired. He has published writing in Artforum, e-flux, DIS, and a Darren Bader monograph from Koenig Books.