Our reality of existence straddles two plains; an online realm and the physical space, often becoming parallel representations of one another. Using this model as a mode of presentation, Coping Copy at Konstanet, simultaneously displays work online and in a gallery space. In Coping Copy, the underlying themes of relationships, technology, and memory are negotiated through video, text, and sculpture. Titled after the 1977 tabletop role-playing game Traveller, Jeffrey Scudder engineered software to create a single pixel continuously moving within a blank screen. Through unconventional narrative, Traveller explores how language and drawing, which is often thought of as poetic expression, has become increasingly systematized by computer software in the attempt to find rationalization.
In an act of recontextualization, Jennyfer Haddad has altered the entire space with two text boxes on opposing walls of the gallery that she has painted entirely half green and half pink. One of the text boxes contains a question that the artist asked google. Opposite of this is the other text box with the resulting answer from another user. Jennyfer’s work seeks to place the viewer in the realm of fantasy, looking beyond the limiting parameters of reality. Deirdre Sargent’s strategic positioning of sculpture and video aims to collapse time, space, and identity through the blurring of fiction and documentary devices as well as photographic manipulations. In her video piece Traveling, the viewer sees two representations of a single woman, distanced by sixty years, engaged in interview, the dialogue exists on its own terms, overlapping the scenes without boundaries. It seems as though Deirdre’s primary concern is to question the limitations of experience once the experiencer has lost the sense of self.
All of the physical and online work, six pieces in total, insert the belief that our contemporary lives are not singular existences, but divided by the digital and the real. The interplay between the work in Coping Copy reveals a non-narrative vantage point. From this, the viewer imbues their own experiences of the self in a symbiosis of form and formlessness.
– Daniel Herwitt
Download and run Traveller on your Mac.
LAUNCH WEB PROJECT ↗
Jennyfer Haddad mixes the boundaries of fiction and reality while she often takes the role of the silent narrator, the observer and the operator who stages situations, investigating the story behind it. Each project begins almost as a crime scene. She sets them up and slowly investigating the space and the people involved, such that Haddad is forced to participate in her own narratives, showing that the act of interpretation can never reach an exhaustive end. Jennyfer Haddad was born in 1983 in France. Haddad graduated from Yale University School of Art, MFA, 2013 and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, BFA, 2010. She was honored with various prizes, such as the Elaine Cooper Award and the America Israel Cultural Foundation Award. She had exhibited internationally in duo and group exhibitions, among others in c/o schocke, Hamburg, Anahita Art Gallery, Tehran and Welcome Screen in London. Her works have been published in several magazines such as the Bebabebo Zine, Oikos Magazine and Lutefisk Magazine.
Deirdre Sargent is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY working with sculpture, photography, and video. She earned a MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from Pratt Institute. Recent solo and two-person shows include You Should Know When to Laugh, 315 Gallery, NYC; Island Girl on Video, AC Institute, NYC; Island Girl, Gordilloscudder, Brooklyn, NY; and Usamlkpda, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH. Recent group shows include From an Object Into an Active Subject, Alexander’s Garage, Brooklyn, NY; Triplication, Sushi Bar Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Noise, ETAA Studio, Seoul, South Korea; Electric Swing, Ruf XXX, Seoul, South Korea; Cicada Screen, The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY; Leopardi Giacomo III, Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn, NY; Triskaidekaphobia, Parade Ground Gallery, NYC; Optic Nerve 14, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; and Providence & Co., Union Docs, Brooklyn, NY.
Jeffrey Scudder (b. 1989) lives and works in Maine and Massachusetts where he spends his time programming and making pictures. He has taught at UCLA and Parsons The New School for Design and worked previously at the design studio Linked by Air. Jeffrey received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 2013.
