As an artist, Anna Uddenberg translates reality to the sculpture while polarizing the view of corporeality, sex (or gender) and commodity aesthetics.
In her figurative and recent abstract works, Uddenberg explores gender performativity and supposedly authentic self-images in the age of social media platforms. Uddenberg continues to develop her formal language in her latest works using the 3D printing process, creating a powerful composition that is brought to unity by the exciting exhibition architecture.
Her latest show at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York once again explores the reality of life.
Anna Uddenberg takes the anaesthetic armature of our increasingly automated environment and distorts it into sexualized pseudo-functional sculptures. The works in Continental Breakfast speak specifically to the body as an asset to modify, control in order to relinquish autonomy to user-friendly technologies. Similar to a BDSM contractual agreement, the body is wilfully supported, entrapped, pampered and ultimately rendered useless, all while on view for public consumption. Uddenberg questions the degree to which we are willingly seduced by algorithms in an increasingly data-driven world.
Pulling from the aesthetics of airline seats, hospital architecture and hotel design, the sculptures express a hyper-functionality inaccessible to human use. Uddenberg’s work materializes at the eroding boundary between object and human. The modification of bodies through digital and medical procedures and the humanization of industrial design through touch screens, organic shapes and ergonomic design come crashing together in Uddenberg’s work.
Continental Breakfast expands on Uddenberg’s fascination with functionality as a mode of control. In the effort to make life efficient, we ultimately change our conception of selfhood on the rhythmic dopamine drip of updates, notifications, and information excess. The title refers to free breakfast offered at hotels, a replica of the light morning meals common throughout the European continent. A simulacra of breakfast offered to the body in transit. Seemingly a luxury, aspirational values are projected onto cheap, mediocre food. Similar to an airplane meal, the body in transit seeks to rectify its authority as it submits to a controlled environment. The hotel, a single domino in the chain of events in cities increasingly inhospitable to everyone but the ultra-wealthy. Uddenberg translates symbolic values of real-estate textures, ‘skins’, veneer and the sheen of steel crowd control blockades into sculptural materiality. These quasi-functional objects of financial domination provide the stage on which performers surrender their bodily autonomy. Stuck in a feedback loop of ‘user-friendly’ technology, interface and industrial design our behavior contorts in the navigation of both physical and digital realms.
