Simon Denny / Norma Jeane

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T293 is proud to present Flights 2000-2019, the first solo exhibition in a gallery by Norma Jeane, an alias of the artist who derives from an ever-changing identity. Each new Norma Jeane project brings out a new personality by the sharing of desires, goals and skills. Norma Jeane can be everybody and no one.

People and objects merge into an abstract, fragmented and complex entity, more in line with a contemporary reality than a biography that wishes to draft an existence in a linear fashion. At the foundation of Norma Jeane’s poetics there are the infinite relationships that are established not only between people, but above all between these and the landscape of objects and images in which the time of our life flows. And the works on display, consisting of snapshots who takes into consideration this flow of relationships, are an example.

The concept stems from the feeling of ancient kinship – which could be considered archetypal – with some household objects, especially those household appliances next to which we grew up. Beyond the function, very useful not to say essential, the importance of their presence in our lives is highlighted, for example, when we recognize the icon with the reassuring pleasure that gives us a familiar face in the crowd.

Norma Jeane makes use of this affinity to give life to its projects. Flights 2000-2019 derives from this emotional relationship that we build with the objects that surround us. Starting from some small fridge magnets found at a supermarket checkout, a story that has been going on for over 20 years was born. In a second moment, the found objects lose their function, they cease being three-dimensional to become flat shapes inside a dusty scanner which, without its cover, gives space both to the objects and to the white atmosphere that surrounds them.

The scanned images undergo further deformations, being continually modified by the infinite means of Photoshop image adjustment windows. They become a series, the same image turns into two, four, eight. Printed and then finally out of the digital screen the images, depicting household appliances, restore the objects’ real dimensions, becoming proportional to the bodies that give them significance.

The images, printed on Fine Arts canvas on a 1:1 scale, give shape to the long and pleasant artist’s search for the emotional exploration of oneself through the objects that surround us every day and with which we develop inseparable relationships. Norma Jeane’s works are aimless flights, snapshots of an emotion whose subject is an object, and basically the canvas is nothing but a mirror.
T293 is pleased to announce our fourth exhibition with Simon Denny, who’s first exhibition at the gallery was over 10 years ago in 2008. During this period Denny’s artistic projects have continued to unpack social and political issues related to the expansion of the internet – interpreting and reflecting the messaging and aesthetics of both, internet businesses and state actors as this core infrastructure has come to dominate global communication and influence politics and society.

Regulation brings together two groups of artworks made between 2017 and 2019; both sculptural responses to the European Union’s attempts at influencing governance and regulating data practices on the internet. The artist sees the EU’s attempts to push back on the power of major platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple as unique – with no other meaningful attempt by foreign state entities. Both bodies of work perform poetic interventions into the EU parliament’s regulatory activity. The artworks utilize drawing, performance and print.

A series of felt tip drawings simultaneously documenting and critiquing debate sessions inside the European Parliament in June 2017 are displayed throughout the gallery on a series of tension-like railings. Produced inside the Parliament’s “Next Generation Internet Summit”, the works were collaboratively composed with NewModels.io co-founder Caroline Busta, datasociety.net researcher Matt Goerzen, artist Daniel Keller and illustrator and imagethink.net founder Nora Herting. They use a genre of live drawing common to session documentation at tech conferences, yet question the parliamentary talks presented rather than simply illustrating their key themes.

On the wall are three new paper reliefs produced using a now-outmoded 3D printing technology developed and used during the mid 2010s. The machines used to produce these artworks were designed to turn stacks of A4 paper into small 3D prints, by cutting, gluing and stacking sheets of paper in an automated process. The artworks are produced by feeding GDPR EU privacy regulation documents into these machines and “printing” 3d shapes based on the Parliament’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) symbol – a padlock with stars surrounding it. The artist then reworks these printed objects by hand. Part document, part collage, part wall relief, part 3d print, these works layer language of legal documents and data privacy on top of each other in bureaucratic stacks, forming a kind of 3d concrete poem of legalese and data.