VERY BEAUTIFUL IMAGES WITH QUITE A BIT OF CONCERNING TEXT LAID OVER THE ARTWORK

Blade Study has been awarded The Gramercy International Prize "for the gallery’s support of a new generation of artists with an audience for conceptually rigorous work" and will present a solo presentation by artist Paige K. B., "VERY BEAUTIFUL IMAGES WITH QUITE A BIT OF CONCERNING TEXT LAID OVER THE ARTWORK."

In the early days of the internet, users created representations of themselves through text. With the onward march of technology came the predominately visual internet, but the gesture of collating and collaging material onto “boards” carried over—a move from moderator-operated forums to posting on social media. And whither art? The ever-salient John Berger wondered in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing whether corkboards of idiosyncratically arranged reproductions might logically replace museums.

With this history as context, Paige K. B. locates her installations of oil, acrylic, embroidered, printed, and decoupaged paintings at the nexus of visual representation and textual discourse. Blade Study is proud to present for their Gramercy International Prize–winning booth the artist’s new body of work, titled after one potential answer to the question “What is a meme?” The installation of paintings, a suite of personal photographs, and sculptural elements both handmade and readymade stages a conspiratorial encounter between origami cranes, an in-development D.A.R.P.A. aircraft model, the “jester’s privilege” meme, a room on fire, modernist poetry, and the Pantone color of the year for 2024: Peach Fuzz.

One recurring visual c(l)ue in the artist’s oeuvre is Prussian blue—an allusion to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s postulation that the word for the color is its original and any sample of the hue is only a serviceable copy. Here, nine variously scaled paintings propose a similar critical relation between source and reproduction, text and picture, past and present, craft and technology, including two shaped panels—one a keychain-charm version of a Shaker gift drawing. Other paintings rework a fawning missive from an insolvent bank and the artist’s old business card. All lay claim to the status of new originals, with their original reference materials submerged into acrylic medium and exhibited in a convenient receptacle.

VERY BEAUTIFUL IMAGES is a site of production, reproduction, and circulation of puzzle pieces in an analog culture of the digital. In a nod to the substructure of this revolution, the artist wedges the distinctive architecture of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue Apple store into the center of Only in a world of pure (imagination) speculation (2024), the largest painting on view, where gestural marks textured to resemble peeling skin are pasted onto the surface in a kind of drag-and-dropped expressionism. Together with the 3D-milled fools.doc (2024)—which replicates a used iPhone case—the artist visually puns on the reality of our contemporary way of seeing. And, as in the artist’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition with the gallery last year, this Armory arrangement features works that make use of phosphorescent passages, incorporate collaged references to the artist’s previous installations, and hang artworks at dog’s-eye level.

Pure imagination bleeds into pure speculation; Newton’s apple is poised to fall like appliqué cherry blossoms that appear to follow Galileo’s law of falling bodies. Those same flowers, gathered and preserved by the artist annually, rest in a cradle of silk—suspended from a device designed to carry pet waste. Dooloop or doom loop? You know the saying about trash and treasure?

—Responsible Dog Owner, 2024

Paige K. B. is an artist and writer from Los Angeles based in New York. She has staged solo exhibitions at Blade Study, KAJE, and Lubov and been included in thematic and group exhibitions at Somerset House in London as well as Simone Subal, Kai Matsumiya, the Broodthaers Society of America, and Theta in New York, in addition to contributing to Canal Street Research Association’s installation for the 2021–22 iteration of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1. Her work has been featured numerous times on Contemporary Art Daily and written about in The New Yorker, Cultured, e-flux Criticism, and Artforum, among other publications, and her own writing has been featured in numerous magazines, catalogues, and online platforms for over a decade including The New York Review of Books, Artforum—where she was formerly an associate editor—Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Viscose, GARAGE, Topical Cream, Triple Canopy, and Spike. She authored the monograph Suellen Rocca: In Dreams, The Last Works (Matthew Marks, 2022) and her second book, Drive It All Over Me, was published by S*I*G-Verlag in Berlin and released at Maxwell Graham in New York in October 2023. She has participated in readings at Artists Space, the Drawing Center, McNally Jackson, and on Montez Press Radio.