artist statement
I take apart and remake things to create magical disorienting experiences. I often build things from commercial products and popular media and create new contextual enclosures to allow reappropriated materials to be consumed differently. This process is an intuitive system to create new spaces to explore the agenda of the “originals” and the mechanism by which media is produced and consumed. My work includes: performance art, live art installations, single channel videos, photo composites, media sculptures, music, and public street art. My gaming series explores American mythology and conquest through an intuitive, associative and kinetic dialogue between the female body and the male-centric fantasy world of classic video games (strange, beautiful 8-64 bit distillations of American longing). My current series of multiform intermedia “love songs for a dying world” seeks to create physical, associative, and aural environments in which people can experience our relationship to the decaying natural environment, and imagine a feminine re-evolution towards a brighter future. I relocated from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in where I’m dismantling and building new things.
Kristin has performed and shown work at: Film Society of Lincoln Center; Brooklyn Museum; Queens Museum; Philly Live Arts; Shapeshifter Lab; St. Vitus; Invisible Dog; Baby Castles; Con Artists Collective; Anarko Art; The Living Theatre; Galapagos Art Space; Recession Arts; Trestle Gallery; tamtamArt, Berlin; Museum Manggha, Krakow; Crossing Borders Intermedia Festival, Hong Kong; HM157, LA; Hushe Club, LA; Utopian Voids, Inland Empire, CA
(above)
Ooz’n USA
A look at feminine id/entity, vastness, longing and the US motorways. In this performance, Nintendo 64’s Cruis’n USA is sampled, manipulated and live mapped on and around Kristin’s body as she enters and probes the game and the American open road it imagines.
Kristin Arnesen and Radoslaw Konopka
(Performed at Cloud City NYC, The Living Theatre’s Anarko Art Fair, Invisible Dog, & Recession Arts.) Featured in excerpt on NHK Japanese TV.
Media Sculptures
These media playing devices were made with small LCD screens, Raspberry Pi compact computers and found consumer objects including Nintendo game cartridges and arcade miniatures. The first three are from the gaming series and the final piece, Hello Pussy Party in a Box, is Kristin’s trip into the curious landscape of video sharing and self-made dance videos. Her video is embedded in a Hello Kitty turned Hello Pussy lunchbox and equipped with speakers and party favors for a party that can pop up anywhere you can plug it in.
Kristin Arnesen & Radoslaw Konopka, Adam Bach (Hello Pussy Music), Christopher Gilkey (Hello Pussy Dancer)
(Exhibited at Recession Arts at The Invisible Dog, Brooklyn)
(above)
Disappearing Women
Kristin and her collaborator performed this public art/dance piece entitled "Disappearing Women" at an Ikea in Brooklyn as a creative act against Ikea's decision to remove women and girls from their catalogues in the Middle East.
Kristin Arnesen and Poppy Tart. Dallas Owens (Camera), Nick Demopoulos (Music).
Moments Under Melting Ice / Love Song for a Crying World
Video projection, sound, light, and the artist's body come together to incubate a place and moment to contemplate our relationship to a deteriorating natural environment and imagine feminine transformation towards a possible future.
Variations of this piece were performed at the LiVEART.US Transformations series at the Queens Museum, and at the Crossing Borders / Border Crossing Festival of Intermedia in Hong Kong. This performance is Kristin's rejection of her country's repeated abandonment of the Paris climate accord, and her love song for a crying world.
FUCKING GIRLS IN A BLACK HOLE
Polaroids from Kristin’s joint exhibit with Audrey Ryan. The artists created an archeological site exploring their private and public identities, bodies, and ontological meaning through their childhood toys, girlhood fossils, performance, video, paintings, sound, panties, blood and vomit. Shown at Babycastles Gallery, NYC.
Natural Wonders
This single channel video relocates Kristin’s childhood My Little Ponies in pastoral video stills. Shown at Babycastles, for the artist’s Fuckn Girls exhibit.
(above)
Westbound
A recreation of Kanye West's viral music video Bound 2 using sampled and hacked media from Nintendo, Atari, and Sega Genesis video games. Kristin’s primary interest in the original video was the space of collective imagination, longing and conquest it invoked in its vast American landscapes and the fantastical muse of Kim Kardashian at its center.
Kristin Arnesen and Radoslaw Konopka
“Persuasion”
From Kristin’s EP IF with her electronic band Intra Faction.
Kristin Arnesen (vocals and video) with Intra Faction.