Kate F
I began work on this show in June 2022. Following a wave of 80s nostalgia on social media, a shopping addiction relapse, and paranoia about what identity, relationships, counterculture, and community look like in digital spaces, I wrote a short story titled Roadtrip Mixtape. The short story contains too many tangents for me to properly summarize in this statement, so I’ll keep it short: a person named Mercedes lives in the distant future and is dissatisfied with their life and the world around them; to escape, they spend most of their time on the matrix-like social media platform “Plato’s Dream,” where they engage in endless, insufferable arguments about 70s and 80s music. Also, Mercedes is a car. And simultaneously an evolved descendant of modern humans. Like I said, lots of tangents.
This work is based in postmodern thinking about the nature of reality: the idea that there is no objective truth, but a subjective one filtered by the experience of individuals. I am not interested in accepting or rejecting this line of thought. Rather, I am curious about what happens when someone’s nostalgic reality contrasts with things you confidently believe (ie. Kate F. - b. 1999- shows up to tell you some lies about what the 1980s were like). The 60s-90s are a particularly appealing era for this conversation due to
The bulk of this show is a series of 400 Polaroid photos. Most of them are real photos of locations I went to, objects I made, costumes I have worn, scenes I have constructed. Many of the Kate-made objects in these photos are crocheted, knit, or sewn facsimiles of vintage tech, memorabilia, clothes, etc. I enjoy the undisguised handmade quality of these objects, as it references the constructed nature of this nostalgia. Yarn also has connotations of comfort, warmth, and authenticity, which runs in delicious contrast to the implicit artificiality of the work.
But what about the polaroids that aren’t “real''? These other images are “fauxlaroids,” a portmanteau I’ve been using to talk about digitally altered or AI generated images exposed onto Polaroid film. AI art is interesting to me, as it encapsulates a number of aspects of the world depicted in my short story: technology blurring the lines between meat-space and digital worlds, images and ideas that are fully derivative of already existing media, and an ethically-tenuous relationship between consumers, laborers, and tech-bro capitalists.
What our brains understand as real isn’t always the most “truthful” option, but the most appealing one, the option that scratches the primordial itch in our brain in the most gratifying way. I think about supernormal stimuli, which are artificially-exaggerated objects or experiences that give an organism a more powerful response than the original stimuli they evolved to seek. This phenomenon is not inherently harmful, but can blur reality to harmful effect. Individuals may respond to these sorts of stimuli by isolating themselves, suppressing important-if-painful memories, losing empathy for others, altering their patterns of consumption and their support of causes, choosing a strawberry-flavored candy over a real fruit every single time the opportunity presents itself.
I guess what I’m trying to say is:
It is hyperbolic beyond recognition. It is the biggest understatement of a lifetime. It is a painstakingly-crafted mixtape for a road trip that didn’t happen and could never happen again.
Party Rock.