Cory Arcangel: All the Small Things

Besides creating and manipulating drawings, sculptures, photographs, and videos with digital tools, Arcangel is also notorious for his clever re-configuration of video games by tweaking computer code. He finds an abject beauty in technologies that were once state-of-the-art and are doomed to obsolescence.

All the Small Things features both new works by Arcangel, as well as a selection of seminal early works which have been re-configured by the artist specifically for the exhibition. The works are designed for a multitude of exhibition contexts including the gallery, cinema, performance, the web, and the Museum gift shop. In addition, they are constructed in an  array of mediums: foam pool noodles adorned with textiles and electronics (Screen-Agers, Tall Boys, and Whales, 2011-2014), flatscreens displaying an obsolete image effect from the web's golden era (Lakes, 2013-ongoing), video generated by video game controllers (Self Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2, 2011), pop punk (Since U Been Gone / Music For Stereos, 2014) and minimal piano compositions (Dances For The Electric Piano, 2013-2014).

Arcangel’s work bridges high- and low-brow technologies, blurs the line between popular culture and art. With All the Small Things, he presents media and cultural references that are widely accessible in novel and unorthodox ways – many of Arcangel's works are available as video and code based works on the Internet.

Altering and manipulating both contemporary and dated technologies Arcangel produces work that shares sentiments with Minimalism and Fluxus, and calls attention to the complicated, evolving relationships we have as consumers, and humans, to the tools, media platforms, and data that saturate our screens and thus our lives.

Arcangel has achieved international success and acclaim and has exhibited extensively at both galleries and major museums, such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Barbican, and MoCA, North Miami. His works are in the collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian and the Tate. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York, Lisson Gallery in London, and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris and Salzburg.

The exhibition opens in Reykjavík Art Museum Hafnarhús on 31 January and will continue until 12 Apríl, 2015.

All The Small Things is curated by Michael Bank Christoffersen and organized in collaboration with HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

Original exhibition sponsor: The Obel Family Foundation..