HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Dead Channel, a solo exhibition of paintings by Kirsten Deirup, marking her third solo presentation with the gallery.
The exhibition’s title, Dead Channel, borrows from the opening line of William Gibson’s 1984 science-fiction novel Neuromancer, which imagines a world in which human consciousness interfaces with cyberspace. Defunct apparatuses of a not-too-distant past like the corded telephone, a clicky computer keyboard, or shiny CD dot Deirup’s painterly mechanical graveyards, which feel strangely archeological. Deirup treats obsolete media not as nostalgic artifacts but as haunted thresholds: objects once used to connect outward that now register instead as sites of interruption, projection, and estrangement. In these paintings, the world arrives as both image and afterimage, seductive in its surfaces and unsettled in its transmission.
While human presence is merely suggested through man-made artifacts left behind, Deirup introduces new beings into this body of work. Part mythical creature, part digital ghost, these figures seem to emerge from underground depths or the recesses of the subconscious, perhaps as unintended byproducts of technology’s accelerating pace. Hauntingly beautiful, their toothy grimaces and sharp talons are offset by iridescent feathers, swishing tails, and jeweled adornments. Positioned to confront the viewer directly, they inject a sense of surveillance into the act of looking, which is no longer passive or anonymous.
