Amalia Ullman, Installation view of ‘ Stock Images of War’.
Amalia Ullman frequently tackles complex questions about the creation of narrative and persona on the internet through otherwise simplistic materials and media. Her solo exhibition, Stock Images of War at Four Six One Nine, a pop-up gallery in Culver City, was originally presented at James Fuentes Gallery in New York. Though Ullman is an LA artist, this exhibition presented the L.A. debut of this work, which is as flat as a computer screen while remaining effectively disturbing.
The solo show consisted of a variety of silver wire, wrapped and twisted into outlines of military tanks and other vehicles, which were scattered throughout the gallery. Heavy metal music played over speakers. A nauseating scent of apple cinnamon medley wafted through the space — a reminder of artificiality, over-sweetening, and the unnecessary olfactory stimulation found in a cheap motel or a 99 cent store. The status quo is unsteady.
These disparate, delicate “weapons of mass destruction” have the sense that that could literally be torched to the ground at any moment. They are made from the same materials that, “Latino immigrants sell in the streets of Spain: tiny handmade wire motorcycles, wire roses,” Ullman told Vulture. This choice of materials was influenced by her childhood in Spain, where the Argentinian-born artist grew up.
Amalia Ullman, Installation view of ‘ Stock Images of War’.
These skeletons of what would otherwise be hulking tanks suggest a variety of ideas, namely: the concept of war as innately delicate in its emotional brutality; the false sense of truth or evidence that we often times obtain from images of war found online; and the media spectacle around the ongoing “war on terrorism” — a numbing phrase so oft-repeated during the Democratic and Republican debates.
Hardly sharp and biting; indeed, the work feels like a looming memory of something powerful, as ghostly as Luc Tuymans’ painting Soldier (1999), yet as fragile as a soldier on the brink of death. The material landscape mirrors the Internet, actually, where at times the only images we remember browsing through consist of either cats, cute dogs, pizzas or a GIF loop of someone making a crazed facial expression. In Ullman’s work, it all feels in some way ephemeral.
Ullman’s artwork also reminds of the horrors that the world experienced through seeing Abu Ghraib prison torture photos, with the image of the hooded prisoner becoming a stock image of the Iraq War, a symbol of what happened, but not what it was really like as a place, a time, a global devastation.
Amalia Ullman, Installation view of ‘ Stock Images of War’.
“In a global community of emotions, war is gossip, torture is a parallel act of deconstruction and images serve as the function of heavy artillery,” writes Ullman in her artist statement. This makes sense, for messing with perceptions of space, reality and internet-time happens to be one of Ullman’s specialties.
In her recent Instagram celeb project, she studied the most popular images of attractive girls and used them as models for creating characters that she would embody: she became an actress in her own namesake’s Instagram, using her @amaliaullman account to showcase selfies of herself as a “Tumblr girl,” “sugar baby ghetto girl” and “girl next door/healthy yoga girl.” Her Instagram account now has over 100K followers, and while it’s her, it’s also “her,” a fictionalized version of the self intent on exploring Instagram constructed versions of social constructions of femininity. This exploration of the framework behind the project extends gracefully into her Stock Images of War series, a poignant reminder of the nature of how easily we buy into what’s on the screens we peer into everyday.
Images courtesy of James Fuentes Gallery.
