Anything in life can happen, especially nothing... Tatjana Pieters / Ghent, Belgium 22 Oct - 10 Dec 2017
Our culture is increasingly demanding us to validate our moments through technology. We create a digital facsimile of our lived experiences, filtered, edited, corrupted and reposted into a virtual landscape where antiquated notions of what used to constitute reality are now obsolete. A zone where context, time and hierarchy have collapsed onto a never ending virtual plane, which can be accessed and remixed by individual users anywhere, anytime at will.
For 'Anything can happen in life, especially nothing…' Pybus transforms the gallery into a museum theme park of sorts. Each work in the exhibition was sampled from the art historical canon, to which he has reconfigured and reedited much like one may add filters and stickers in apps like Snapchat or Photoshop popular memes to be posted onto tumblr and Instagram.
Pybus utilises physical processes such as painting and sculpture to transform these digitised acts into a physical analogue reality. Sampling liberally from our global networked collective consciousness he remixes the imagery he samples, to create new narratives and readings before 'reposting' them into the gallery space.
The works pay homage to and celebrate their originating predecessors. Artists like Koons, Lichtenstein, Warhol and Picasso are all literally placed on the pedestal of high culture. These icons of success and wealth emulated by Pybus, through his 'remaking' their works, mirror our collective tendency to emulate those who are perceived as superior in their status. It represents a 'Kardashian phenomenon' which embodies our escape into virtual expression and 'reality culture' at a point in our history where our insatiable appetite to be distracted from our 'actual realities' cannot be curbed.