STAY AT HOME | JEREMY BAILEY

STAY AT HOME #08

JEREMY BAILEY
Nail Art Museum


Press Release

[The art happens here]
Annka Kultys Gallery’s online platform dedicated to the showcasing of digital art in its natural habitat, so to speak.  The creation in 2020 of [The art happens here] provides a natural extension to the gallery’s offline programme which has as one of its strengths the presentation of “digital natives” or artists making art that engages with technology and the internet.

PRESS RELEASE

Annka Kultys is pleased to present Jeremy Bailey’s video Nail Art Museum (2014) as the eighth instalment of the gallery’s online exhibition Stay at home, a presentation of new digital works produced by artists in response to the coronavirus pandemic.  On every Sunday of the lockdown during Stay at home, a new artist will be showcased on AKG’s recently launched online platform [The art happens here].  Bailey’s video is on show for the eighth week of Stay at home, following on from Marc Lee’s live streaming video TV Bot (2020), Alice Bucknell’s video Welcome to Nütropix (2020) last week, Allan Gardner’s Infowars Made Me Hardcore (2020), James Knott’s Crisis Du Jour series, Eggs (2019) and Beans in Isolation (2020), Jillian Mayer’s You’ll Be Okay, Adad Hannah’s Social Distancing Video Portraits, and the opening show, James Irwin’s Surface Collider (23032020).

AKG is also announcing all gallery benefits (i.e., profits after the artist has been compensated in the usual manner) from featured digital works sold via [The art happens here] will be donated to the National Emergencies Trust.  The purchasers’ generosity will help to financially support the featured artists during this unprecedented period when non-essential shops are closed, including art museums and commercial galleries, leading to postponed exhibitions for artists, and ensuring at least part of artists’ incomes can be maintained.

In his video performance Nail Art Museum (2014), Jeremy Bailey proposes that we will soon be able to use augmented reality software to create bespoke museums, quite literally on our finger-tips.  Using 3D animation and his avatar ‘Famous New Media Artist,’ Bailey suggests that technology artists like himself will be able to summon curated artworks onto their finger-tip plinths as the distance between the artist and art institution is narrowed to become a punning ‘handstitution.’  Using images of works such as the Venus de Milo to Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait to a Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, dating from antiquity to the contemporary, he exhibits the power of the technology artist to curate their own virtual art museum shows, while also satirically commenting on the nature of creativity, celebrity and artistic value within the virtual art sphere.

Today, when art museums are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Bailey wryly suggests a possible new way to visit museums, while simultaneously observing the applicable social distancing rules.

Work curtesy the artist and Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto.

BIOGRAPHY
Working as a software developer during the day, Jeremy Bailey spends his evenings and weekends crafting performances, videos and installations that address how technology is changing the way in which we see and connect with the world around us.  Yet rather than simply utilising existing technologies, Bailey finds ways to hack technological systems and turn them into new tools to help us imagine and to parody the future.

Jeremy Bailey was born in 1979 in Toronto, where he lives and works.

Annka Kultys Gallery