Akwetey John

About the artist

The work of Ghanaian and American artist Akwetey John Orraca-Tetteh spans a practice of painting, performance and new media. Highly influenced by the supernatural and emerging technologies, the New York born artist is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

FULL CV HERE

ONLINE RESIDENCY / CHALLENGE PAPER STATEMENT

In our current isolated existence, we virtually face CORONA DAZE, a new world spinning into chaos under pandemic. Ever still, digital consciousness further extends towards The Simulation. Under threat from plague, disease and famine, how can artists forward harmonic radical action in the cloud? How can we empower humanity to endure, sustain and thrive into the future from our screens? What are the new blueprints for the future that inhabit systems of disorder and decay, in order that these systems be identified, understood, and transformed? What are the means and methods of creating such blueprints?

With tools of innovation and social connection,  21st century artists can embrace a Digital Humanism that frees the collective consciousness from the recursive strokes of physical history and wrestles with the virtual experience decay of life and spirit. As such, artists will be the engineers of new lineages from which the new future will be born. A newly imagined digital humanity must seek to access and pollinate a new quanta of virtual human thought. Existing as digital paintings, my selected works accept and tug at the elastic effects of the page, questioning the inner mechanics of digital humanity in crises. 

As such, exploring the settings and conditions under which virtual networks exist amidst IRL collapse, the A4 page is an optimal medium. Within the confines of our quarantined reality, The "A4" page exists as a template for collective virtual engagement despite universal isolation. As we encounter world wide ontological discussions concerning the "evidence" of "new mediums of investigation" during a pandemic , we must perhaps consider this question-- What if a virus spread to the page, interrupting our last vestige of human connection? How would that inform a new world?

Unearthed from an inspired automatic poem , an audio recording, and a series of computer crashes, my selected digital tableuas  perform as virtual A4's collapsed in time and "trapped" as we live under lockdown.  Confronting the viewer are the image, sound, and words of disaster revealing the static tensions and energies behind our virtual and in-real-life networks under threat. 

GALLERY