MANILA, Philippines - One standout line in last year’s Danny Boyle-directed and Aaron Sorkin-penned film Steve Jobs came from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, arguing with the titular character over the future of tech design: “Computers aren’t paintings!” A lot has changed since the first personal computers hit the market, obviously. Digital and analog have since collided in unexpected ways, giving birth to something new, something that is both familiar and alien at the same time. This, is in some ways, can be seen in Charles Buenconsejo’s latest exhibit, “Name, Kind, Application, Date Last Opened, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created, Size, Tags.”
In his latest exhibit, which opened last night, Buenconsejo uses modern-day identifiers as inspiration for his work. As Alice Sarmiento wrote, “Buenconsejo shows massive grids of images drawn from the Internet which, even at this scale, still represent but a tiny fraction of what is out there. By using the web as both material and concept, the works in in Name, Kind, etc… fall into a growing catalog of Post-internet art practice, referring to the internet as (yet another) metaphor for the universe.”
“Name, Kind…” etc. offers a new understanding of Buenconsejo as an artist. Known for his photography both in fine art and in various publications, he breaks down not only our ideas of the Internet but perceptions of himself as well.
We often get stuck — or, in worse cases, trapped — online, unable to move past how we are seen in social media, but to quote Wozniak again: “It’s not binary.” And as Buenconsejo’s latest work shows, not everything can be defined so easily.
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“Name, Kind, Application, Date Last Opened, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created, Size, Tags” runs from April 21 to May 21, 2016 at Artinformal, 277 Connecticut Street, Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City, Philippines. For more information visit: http://www.artinformal.com/.