Some people spend too much time on the internet. And by some people I mean you, obviously, and me. All of us. It’s just that most people don’t turn that filthy habit into art. Parker Ito does, though.
Walking into the American artist’s show here is like stumbling upon a long lost shrine. Two scanners on the floor strobe and flash in the darkness, attempting to scan a plastic statuette of some manga knight. The scanners are now kinetic, devotional sculptures. Lights flash in the darkness, 8-bit chords scream out of speakers, a disembodied computerised voice asks ‘why am I so beautiful?’ A siren blares and suddenly a spotlight shines on a huge dipthych of paintings in the corner.
Those paintings are probably the easiest entry point to the show, a little slice of approachable, intelligible figuration in this chaos of ideas. Images of knights and saints are printed onto the canvases, then oversprayed with red paint and a thick layer of gungy lacquer. Half-digital, half-physical, it’s an attempt to root this heavily internet-coded work in art history.
Ito is mixing art historical symbols with modern technology and feeding it all through a crippling internet addiction
Then the lights shut off again and you’re plunged back into darkness, the scanners flash, the speakers blurt out ambient chords.
For something so contemporary it actually feels oddly old-fashioned, indebted to the heyday of post-internet art of the mid-2000s, but updated for 2024 – post-post-internet art, I guess? It’s obviously ludicrous, overblown, overdramatic (I mean, the show is called ‘The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk in the Year of the Dragon, Á la Mode’…), but it’s so full of compelling ideas that you can forgive its misgivings.
Ito is mixing art historical symbols with modern technology and feeding it all through a crippling internet addiction. It feels like it’s about image making in a digital world, about locking yourself in your room, going goblin-mode and scrolling the endless proliferation of visual information that blights our lives and trying to find some way of making sense of it, some way of codifying the overwhelming tsunami of digital stuff we’re all drowning under.
