Seth Lower: “Tired Eyes“

Artist Seth Lower has become allergic to pixels. When using screens, Lower has been experiencing optical migraines and severe bouts of vertigo, creating a crisis not only within his artistic practice but also one of social and economic mobility. In 2018, the Palais des Beaux Arts began collecting portions of Lower’s Instagram feed, a site he has used to explore threads of absence and autobiography since 2014.

Seth Lower: “Tired Eyes“

Freitag, 23. November 2018, 19.00 Uhr

Gäste im Salon:

Palais des Beaux Arts Wien Alexandra Wanderer und Seth Weiner


Salon für Kunstbuch Luftbadgasse 16, 1060 Wien www.salon-fuer-kunstbuch.at

Artist Seth Lower has become allergic to pixels. When using screens, Lower has been experiencing optical migraines and severe bouts of vertigo, creating a crisis not only within his artistic practice but also one of social and economic mobility. In 2018, the Palais des Beaux Arts began collecting portions of Lower’s Instagram feed, a site he has used to explore threads of absence and autobiography since 2014. The tyranny of images, in this case internalized physically by Lower, has inevitably become the subject of his Instagram practice while he negotiates with the format of the screen for his health.
Please join the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien for a presentation of the project. After an introduction by Seth Weiner, Alexandra Wanderer will serve as an intermediary in the presentation of Lower’s work.

Vienna Art Week-Link: https://2018.viennaartweek.at/en/program/praesentation-tired-eyes
Palais des Beaux Arts Wien: http://palaisdesbeauxarts.at

Seth Lower (1981, USA) Dealing primarily with the relationship between photography and text, Seth Lower often works in book format, using mélanges of observed and invented details to explore issues of documentary descriptions within subjective practice, and vice versa. Lower received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 2008, his work has been exhibited at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, the Torrance Art Museum, Bond Street Gallery New York, Cirrus Gallery, metro pcs. Los Angeles, Bäckerstraße 4 in Vienna, and N.K. Berlin among others. Recent artist books include, The Sun Shone Glaringly (The Ice Plant, 2014), Man with Buoy and Other Tales (Little Brown Mushroom, 2010).
Alexandra Wanderer (1988, RO) Primarily through the medium of photography, Alexandra Wanderer explores political undertones that are embedded within the everyday. By questioning the gaze, she reveals the anthropomorphic qualities of her surroundings as well as the construction of meaning through the act of framing. Wanderer recently finished a large format artist book Palms in a Guest House, that explores the exoticization and display of planted matter. Currently, she is working on a film project in Romania that focuses on the layering of economic and political structures which are reflected through the domestic space of the garden, which is undergoing radical shifts in both its symbolic and practical functions.
Wanderer studied Theater Film and Media Science at the University of Vienna (2014), attended the Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography (2016), and is studying Art and Digital Media with Constanze Ruhm at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is also a member of the Mala Sirena choir.
Seth Weiner (1982, USA) Often containing performance and proposal simultaneously, Weiner’s work employs a wide range of media in which he explores the gaps between architectural fiction and social convention to create both actual and imagined spatial environments. He studied architecture at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles (2010), drawing and painting at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005) and sound at the Center for the Creation of Music Iannis Xenakis in Paris (2006). Process-based and collaborative, Weiner has worked with Untitled Collective (co-founded in 2010), Gruppe Uno Wien, and has been the Co-Artistic Director of Care Of Editions with Gerhard Schultz since 2012. In 2018, Weiner became the Artistic Director of Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, a postdigital institution focused on a contemporary past.

Bernhard Cella is interested in the economic and sculptural framework in which artists’ books – highly informed objects in themselves – can be used as artistic materials. To this end, he conceptualized the ’Salon für Kunstbuch’, a life-size model of a bookshop, in his studio in Vienna. Since 2007, more than 12.000 artists' books have accumulated and entered into unfamiliar vicinities and dialogues. Buying and selling these objects become an integral part of an original artistic practice.

Seth Lower, 2016-02-28@14.34.52, 33 Likes - From the Project “Instagram Inner Sanctum,” 2018