Exercise Videos
Jan 30 – Feb 6, 2017
The three video works in the exhibition each use material appropriated from Kim Kardashian’s exercise DVD series Fit in Your Jeans By Friday, to address the construction of gendered identities and the aspirational aspects of celebrity culture. While the reality television star enthusiastically describes the exercise routines that follow, an animation slowly fills the screen, replacing the video imagery with a field of monochromatic color. As the uniform color fills the televisual frame, the audio is slowly enveloped by colored noise. Similar to white noise, these spectral sounds are frequencies associated with light patterns and correspond to the color field in each work.
Deriving their colors from the DVD packaging of Kardashian’s exercise tape series: Ultimate Butt Body Sculpt (pink), Butt Blasting Cardio Step (red) and Amazing Abs Body Sculpt (blue), the works humorously refer back to their initial status as packaged products for consumption. The artist maintains that the monochrome proposes a utopic space where no point has more value than another. As a placeholder for an image or content, the monochrome offers viewers a potential ideational space or an indeterminate window to nothing. By drawing a direct parallel between the void of the monochrome and the cultural void of reality television products, the artist points to the difficulty of discerning the legitimacy and long-term consequences of a post-reality reality.
