Kim Gordon has been struggling with her relationship with her phone for some time. The influential musician, artist and founder of cult clothing label X-girl traces the origins of her attachment to the post-September when she Needs to be in constant communication with her loved ones. At the time, as she recalls, there was a lot: “I’m here. Where are you? Okay, fine.”
In later years, her phone use became more purposeful. Before Gordon left Northampton, Mass. — the center of the counterculture where she had raised her daughter for the past two decades — for her hometown of Los Angeles a few years ago, Gordon approached social media almost like an art form. Every now and then, the former Sonic Youth anchorwoman posts a mundane scene on Instagram that, upon closer inspection, revels in the absurdity of life: a battered Frieze-themed East Village pizza box; a battered dog toy , next to a pair of leopard-print underwear. She captioned the photos “throw,” and they offer the same sarcastic wit as her actual art practice. Today, at her Glendale, California, studio where most of her visuals are conceived, Gordon admits she’s completely obsessed with her phone. “It’s horrible,” she laughs.
This week, that tormenting 12 years-long romance culminated in the art rock legend’s rookie show at 303 New York Gallery. 12 Exhibition of paintings, on view in the Gallery’s Projects Room until July 20, exploring the duality at the heart of our device-centric lives Sex: Endless possibilities and endless losses all at the touch of our fingertips. Gordon explained: “The iPhone is like a whole world that you can fall into, but they’re also hollow. You have to be careful.”
New work – a The six-by-seven-foot canvas and the 12 much smaller square canvas—a departure from the brushstroke graphics and paint-drip text graffiti that Gordon had previously shown. Layers of their wet, brooding watercolors reveal cloudy pools of charcoal spewing volcanic crimson and electric yellow highlights. The colors and drip effects of these paintings are loosely related to the late Cy Twombly, but Gordon’s main point of reference is something else. “The iPhone promises freedom and control over communication,” she said. “It’s a way of self-expression, a way of escaping and distracting from the bigger picture of what’s going on in the world. It’s also useful for drawing.”
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how many times completed After each piece, Gordon places an empty iPhone 12 Pro case on their surface, tracing like a stencil and hollowing out the shape with a blade. Each carving acts as a tiny act of reclamation – time, attention, sanity lost to the object – and creates a portal to another world.
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