LOVE ME BACK
LILJA BIRGISDÓTTIR
June 15–July 30, 2017
Opening reception: Thursday, June 15, 6–8 PM
For immediate release:
Rawson Projects is delighted to announce its second solo exhibition with Icelandic artist Lilja Birgisdóttir. Love Me Back will present a new body of photographic and sculptural work that explores the disconnection between our virtual self and embodied existence.
As our consciousness is expanded and extended into our phones, our subjectivity and sense of self is now increasingly performed on various social media platforms. As we tread forward into the unknown, our rapidly growing digital consciousness and identity is in competition with our embodied sensorial experience of the world.
In a seemingly endless ocean of information and the restless chatter of social media we can curate and edit our lives. At what point does this virtual identity not just define but obscure and even damage our real life self? Trauma and loss now have digital consequences that compound suffering. After a painful breakup there can be very tidy erasure as images of past lovers vanish from accounts and our sights forever.
Who then is the ‘real’ me, in my physical presence in the here and now, armed with my immediate sensory experience of the world?
Birgisdóttir’s previous exhibition at Rawson Projects If your colors were like my dream (2015) received positive reviews in both The New York Times and Modern Painters.
Lilja Birgisdóttir studied photography at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, Netherlands and received BA in fine art from the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavík, Iceland in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include 8 Storms at the National Gallery of Iceland as part of The Icelandic art Festival (2016) and Moment Gone at Ultra Super New Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2016). Birgisdóttir was the composer and conductor of the The Vessel Orchestra, the opening act for the Reykjavík Art Festival in collaboration with the captains of Reykjavík Harbour in May 2013. Since 2010, she has been a member of Kling & Bang, an artist run gallery in Reykjavík where in 2011 she founded Endemi, an art magazine about Icelandic contemporary art.
For more information please contact the gallery at info@rawsonprojects.com or call 212 256 0379