Works by Whitney Valgrin
Both in its physical layout and through the theme of its ongoing group exhibition, The Pleasure Principle, Los Angeles gallery FARAGO embodies the contemporary phenomenon that involves the singular—our physical existence—making way for the plural, the digital. Cultural spheres and industries previously unrelated now blend together, two sides of the same coin, to create new fields never seen before.Founded by artist Max Farago in 2014, FARAGO is reminiscent of your run-of-the-mill white cube, but it also has a “window-shopping” aspect to it, not dissimilar to a furniture or retail store. The space is made up of three sequential storefronts with transparent façades, encouraging the passerby to stop momentarily and contemplate what is inside but not necessarily wander in, an unusual tendency for a gallery space.The Pleasure Principle, the current exhibition at FARAGO, takes this hybridization to even further heights. Curator Courtney Malick has setup an exhibition revolving around neuromarketing, a relatively new field that fuses neuroscience research with marketing to further enhance capitalism’s penetration into the human psyche. The theme came to Malick after learning about neuromarketing from Ada Sokol, one of the artists included in the exhibition, whose textual work Comfort Zone deals specifically with the ways neuromarketing interacts within the beauty industry.“While the idea of utilizing psychological findings towards marketing and media of all kinds is of course nothing new, the level of penetration with which neuromarketing attempts to parse the human brain and trigger its pleasure centers mark an important new direction in this type of persuasion politics,” Malick explains to The Creators Project. “This is particularly because of the ever-increasing amount of time that most individuals spend online and the increasing amount of personal and sensitive information that they share therein.”http://yoshuaokon.com/ing/works/freedomfries/video_vi.html from Yoshua Okon on Vimeo.The idea of the preyed-upon consumer controlled by the capitalist monolith is highlighted in Yoshua Okon's Freedom Fries. The short video depicts a nude, morbidly obese individual lying helplessly on top of a McDonald’s table. The individual stares at a McDonald's employee who is outside of the structure, separated by a thin wall of glass, polishing the commercial storefront and paying no attention to the struggling consumer. The idea: make the product’s surface impeccably attractive, even if its consumption is destructive. Things are complicated further, however, when considering that the employee outside also struggles and is equally implicated, though oblivious or not to what they enable.The complexity at work here is an intentional part of the exhibition’s curation: “I would argue that the strategies the show’s artists use for grappling with such issues goes beyond the kinds of mirroring or enhancing of the aesthetics of such systems that have become standard of much of contemporary art today,” Malick elaborates. “Instead, these artists further complicate the issues at hand—in this case, the calculated grafting of individual, neurological information onto larger, corporatized strategies for branding.”View the aforementioned artworks as well as works by Lucy Chinen, Ryan Trecartin, Whitney Vangrin, Yuehao Jiang, and Matt Doyle at FARAGO in Los Angeles until July 16th.Related:Our Instant Gratification Obsession Gets a Group ShowFacebook Photos and Collages Converge in Portraits of Digital LivesAn Immersive Installation Turns Earth’s Sounds into Psychedelics
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