Ed Atkins. Get Life / Love’s Work exhibition catalog
This book is the catalog accompanying the exhibition Get Life / Love’s Work by British artist Ed Atkins. It was shown by the New Museum in New York City from June 30 to October 3, 2021. The publication includes texts by Erika Balson and Mark Leckey.
The cover shows a face from close up, taken from a video shown in the exhibition. The artist already worked with this high-definition computer-generated character and his close-up face in video print before (see The Worm, 2021). The type simply is in Neue Helvetica, a classic choice for contemporary art books (cf. the Peter Cain monographs), in white caps at the bottom center.
Over the past decade, Atkins has created a complex body of work that considers the relationship between the corporeal and the digital, the ordinary and the uncanny, through high-definition computer-generated (CG) animations, theatrical environments, elliptical writings, and syncopated sound montages. With these filmic and text-based artworks, Atkins tracks forms of feeling, living, and communicating hidden behind or curtailed by technological representation, which unfold into sensitive and often somber narratives.
At the New Museum, Atkins will premiere a new project that focuses on the ways bodies and technologies are intertwined, particularly in the field of digital communication and telepresence. As always in Atkins’s work, technology is analyzed as a theoretical and even allegorical interrogation of itself, rather than in any literal terms.
