Cloud Banks, the new exhibition by Mark Amerika at Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, will coincide with another of Mark Amerika’s exhibition titled Precipitations at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, continuing the aesthetic analysis of the theme of Art and Economics.
Cloud Banks at Kasa Gallery will explore the way artists, political and economic theorists, metaphysical philosophers, and businessmen use language as a tool to construct their vision of the world as they see it. As with much of Amerika’s conceptual net art, the title is a pun, one that refers to both a weather phenomenon – a layer of clouds seen from a distance – and the recent rise of both cloud computing and too-big-to-fail banking systems.
Amerika has taken numerous texts from authors such as Immanuel Kant, John Ruskin, P. T. Barnum, Andy Warhol, Raoul Vaneigem, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and various documents produced by Conceptual artists of the 1960s, to produce experimental tag clouds that reveal both the writer’s use of language and the thematic subjects they obsessed over. Amerika then cleverly manipulates the tag clouds by mashing up some of the texts for aesthetic and political effect. For example, in the show at Kasa Gallery, two of the works on exhibit mashup Conceptual art documents with John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy out of which emerge a subset of tag clouds titled Conceptual Art Mill.
For more information on Mark Amerika’s Cloud Banks exhibition, visit the Kasa Gallery website.
For more information on Mark Amerika’s Precipitations exhibition, visit the Museum of Contemporary Cuts website
