Portrait of Zuck

Sept. 6 – 29

Why present an exhibition of art that focuses on Mark Zuckerberg, you ask?  The answer is, simply, the discovery that a number of artists, from a wide variety of backgrounds, have created work that takes the Facebook founder and CEO as its focus.  (The artists in this show come from five countries and span several generations.)  The question then becomes, why are artists creating work about Zuckerberg?  The answer is—of course—for a variety of reasons. Among the avenues explored: tech billionaire, ultimate data merchant, CEO of the world’s largest social media corporation, enabler of Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolls, goat slayer, Puli owner, embodiment of insatiable capitalism, awkward person, possible robot, probable alien, privacy violator supreme, etc.

The exhibition features work by Sandra Araujo, Marion Balac & Carlos Carbonell, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ryan Garvey, Ben Grosser, Claire Jervert and Lane Twitchell.

In Marion Balac and Carlos Carbonell’s musical odyssey Mark, we follow a CGIZuckerberg (with Zuck head and Smurf-like body) from his birth in 1984, through his rise—first to Facebook CEO, then to U.S. president, and finally to his cosmic contemplation of a fusion with AI—all while remaining a socially awkward person.  Throughout, a choir, Zuckerberg and AI sing their feelings and thoughts regarding their interlaced trajectories.

Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes, with their oft-remarked-upon unusual quality, are the focus of Claire Jervert’s delicately rendered drawing.  Wide open, largely without affect, and with sclera seemingly darker than skin tone, their overall effect is both striking and unsettling.  The image also suggests a visual metaphor for Zuckerberg-owned properties’ access to the personal information of the combined 5 billion users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Sandra Araujo’s video u$aar v3.0 assumes the look (and sound) of an old-school video game as it evokes Facebook’s role in shaping social and political events, such as the Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, via the Cambridge Analytica data breach.  In an architectural setting based on Facebook’s interface, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin make appearances, in addition to a floating data-laden flash drive, Pepe the Frog and My Little Pony.

In his painting Wicked World in 32 DPI, Ryan Garvey compiles images of cable news chyrons related to Facebook which are, like Facebook itself, designed to grab viewers’ attention and keep them engaged for as long as possible.  Additionally, in the painting’s structure, Garvey visually and conceptually conflates the vintage computer game Solitaire with the act of utilizing social media: both are essentially a game of one, though the bleak, solitary socializing of social media temporarily provides an illusion of connection and intimacy.

Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Mark’s Fifth is part of a series of paintings that portray the Facebook founder as a trophy hunter. The series was sparked by a recent interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who stated that there was a year when Zuckerberg was only eating what he was killing, and had a penchant for goat meat. Being served goat for dinner while attending a dinner party at Zuckerberg’s house was Dorsey’s most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg. The paintings imagine that Zuckerberg took this interest in animal killing further, becoming a trophy hunter.

In Lane Twitchell’s Winter’s Discontent #3 (So-So), multiple images of the thumbs-up icon that signifies a “like” on Facebook have been grouped into a circular, mandala-like form, suggesting the focused and almost religious devotion to the pursuit of likes. The signature blue and white colors of Facebook have taken on a snowier tone, as if this pursuit is ultimately unsatisfying and unsatisfiable. The piece’s surprising point of origin was the well-known photograph of art critic Jerry Saltz with former president Bill Clinton, which Saltz long used on his Facebook page.

For Ben Grosser’s video, ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, Grosser watched every public video-recorded appearance by Mark Zuckerberg from 2004 through 2018 and created a supercut drawn from three of Zuckerberg’s most favored words: “more,” “grow,” and his every utterance of a metric, such as “two million” or “one billion.” The result is a nearly fifty-minute film that reveals primary topics of focus for the tech CEO, acting as a lens on what he cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain.

The exhibition was organized by Galerie Manqué curator George Metesky.