January 13 - February 10, 2025
From Martha’s:
“Please join us for an opening reception celebrating Cool Day at Martha’s on Saturday, January 13, 2024, from 6:00-9:00 PM at the gallery’s location on 4115 Guadalupe Street. The exhibition will remain open during regular business hours, 12-6 PM Friday through Saturday until February 10, 2024, and can also be viewed by appointment.
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In the early aughts, pioneering net artists gathered online in “surf clubs,” group blogs created collaboratively with images trawled from surfing the web. It exposed an archival impulse that, while tinted by the unprecedented access the internet gives us to material, has existed since time immemorial. Alongside the hunter-gatherer was the archivist, collecting and mentally cataloging finds that revealed themselves amidst the search for survival.
It’s this impulse that Mia Scarpa (b. 1997) and Grace Horan (b. 1999) seem to follow. Their images and objects evoke an ethos of collecting that animates everything from official archives to family photo albums to online image boards. The result of such an experience is a schizophrenic reading of images that hardly make sense together—except in the fact that they do.
The images of surf clubs’ combination—and the amalgamated images and objects present in “Cool Day”—reveal the heart of collaboration—that we collaborate because we can, not because we have to, that sometimes it’s more about being together than any greater meaning or goal. Interchange “friendship” here for “collaboration” and it still works. And don’t friends make the greatest collaborators? (Until, sometimes, they don’t.) But Scarpa and Horan remind me of the greatest virtue of collaboration: that, at its best, it can feel like a sleepover, a never-ending secret with your best friend, where only you two know the truth. It’s what made early net art so fun; it’s also what most post-internet artists failed to capture. But now that we’re in the post-post-internet—wherein the internet has infused everything so much that there is no after it in the temporally chronological sense, only after in the “inspired by” sense, in the “after the advent of” sense—artists like Scarpa and Horan are bringing back this ethos of fun.
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Text by Grace Sparapani”
Reception: January 13, 2025 | 6–9 pm
4115 Guadalupe Street
Austin, 78751 Texas
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