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

The Armory Show 2024 will take place this year on Thursday, September 5th through Sunday, September 8th at The Javits Center.

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."

Please see The Armory Show 2024 for visitor information and to purchase tickets.

Blade Study will exhibit a newly produced solo exhibition of Paige K. B. produced for The Armory Show as our presentation for The Gramercy International Prize.

In the early text-based internet of BBS boards, a user primarily created representations of themselves through text. With the progression of technology came the predominately visual internet, but the gesture of collating and collaging material onto boards carried over—from moderator operated forums to posting on social media. Even John Berger once wondered whether corkboards of idiosyncratically arranged reproductions might logically replace museums.

With this history as context, the artist and writer Paige K. B. locates her installations of oil, acrylic, embroidered, printed, and decoupaged paintings at the nexus of visual representation and textual discourse. For the 2024 Armory Show, the gallery proposes a solo presentation wherein the artist will playfully stage an experiential encounter with an origami crane, the “jester’s privilege” meme, excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the Pantone color of the year: Peach Fuzz.

Proposing a similar critical relation between source and reproduction, text and picture, past and present, craft and technology, sign and imagination, nine paintings of various scale will include shaped panels depicting a used iPhone case, a servile missive from a bank, and the artist’s old business card along with a suite of personal photographs and several readymade sculptural elements.

The paintings’ reference materials will be submerged into acrylic mediums and exhibited as well. With distinctions between original and copy already blurred in a digitally mediated economy of images, the physical exhibit will become a site of production, reproduction, and circulation of visual puzzle pieces in an analog culture of the digital.

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.