Ahren Warner
7 September - 5 October 2024
PV: 7 September 2024 | 4-8 pm
For afterparty details text: 07513141017
96 Robert St., NW1 3QP, London, UK
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Season 4 Episode 6 presents i love you, you say / i know, they say, a solo project by artist Ahren Warner.
In this exhibition, famed ass-wipe Dan Bilzerian appears as one of the show’s protagonists. In his (as of writing) 1,382 Instagram posts, Bilzerian expresses a desire so base, stock average, and thoroughly unoriginal as to be laughable but also pretty depressing. Shot as high-resolution pixel-shift composites, with Warner’s camera pointed at his iPhone screen, then printed on velvet, we are reminded that these images reference a fantasy which has been sold to us but is not necessarily our own. Ironically, Bilzerian would likely say the same thing we would about everything in these pictures (yet mean something very different): it is all confusingly alluring and remarkably foreign.
Usually, Bilzerian’s images feature people at their heart, although it may not feel like that. In fact, Bilzerian spends much of his time avoiding the humanity of his Instagram subjects. Reminding us of his model colleagues’ (?) living, breathing humanity removes Bilzerian from the centre of his own fantasy; it makes it more difficult to sell himself as a product. Ironically, it shows his world to be a Potemkin village: if none of his friends can ever really be people, then he’s always alone.
Warner’s (extraordinarily cute) cat images are disturbingly similar. We dress up animals as people precisely because it is what they are not: their adorable little costumes highlight the animals as canvases for our own projection. But we’re okay with this total erasure of being: the cat-as-person is funny for how much of the image is fantasy; for how far of a departure from the truth it is. In Bilzerian’s images, has the penny ever really dropped?
This troubling dynamic becomes the focus of Warner’s three-channel film installation, Into that lightening, almost glade (2024). Here, a lurid, and rather pathetic, male sexual fantasy plays out as text over a bleary, oversaturated and hedonistic backdrop. The work highlights the specificity of our commercialised desire, but also its limitation: a dream of hot sex and astounding wealth, but only so far as it corresponds to the narrowed scope of Instagram Reels and TikToks.