currentmood, 2017

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce currentmood, a new edition created by the artist Cory Arcangel that will be on view at the Independent, New York, March 2–5.

currentmood is a set of five canvases housed in a custom box. Arcangel, who is known to materialize his Web-browsing habits through his artworks, offers a kind of image dump as self-portrait. Each canvas demonstrates a distinct visual vocabulary and style, with image sources ranging from paparazzi and luxury advertising to social media posts and the artist’s own oeuvre. The canvases are housed in a high-gloss, commercially printed case (complete with handle), like those used to package and display high-definition televisions. The box’s exterior features a portrait of the late entrepreneur, music producer, and felon Lou Pearlman, famous for the manufacturing of 1990s boy bands—most notably Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync—as well as for orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that sent him to prison, where he died at age sixty-two. Taken together, the components of currentmood reflect the highly controlled and commercialized nature of personal expression online, the frictionless mode of “content discovery” guided by hidden structures and invisible actors.

Arcangel’s work ranges from compositions to modified video games, from performances to Internet interventions. Most recently, Arcangel and Olia Lialina preseented the show “Asymmetrical Response” (2016–17) at Western Front in Vancouver, British Columbia, then at the Kitchen in New York. Under the auspices of his publishing and merchandise imprint Arcangel Surfware, Arcangel presented a solo booth at the 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, New York, where he debuted The Source Digest, a paperback with annotated source code for his software works.

Arcangel’s recent solo exhibitions include “currentmood” (2016) at Lisson Gallery, London; “Be the first of your friends” (2015) at Espace Louis Vuitton München, Germany; “This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous” (2015) at Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy; and “All the Small Things” (2015) at the Reykjavík Art Museum. With “Pro Tools” (2011), Arcangel became the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have a full-floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is included in many public collections, including those of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.

Special thanks to Lisson Gallery for its generous support.