Zara Worth: FEED

‘FEED’ brings together a body of work created by Zara Worth since 2016. Concerned with our relationships with hand-held technology and social media, Worth’s practice has been described by curator Tyler Robarge as ‘swipe-specific’: using online culture and technology as subject and medium for artworks with on- and offline lives. Throughout the exhibition materials and methods of creative production point to themes of value, presence and self-image in the social media age. Materials such as rice paper, 23.5 carat gold, void fill, celery, and artificial roses, have symbolic and cultural value; providing metaphors through which to read online culture.

The exhibition’s title alludes to Worth’s love of wordplay and ambiguity: ‘FEED’ variously refers to social media newsfeeds, literal and metaphorical consumption, and the expression ‘feeding the beast’ – used by vloggers and bloggers to describe the voracity of online platforms. Likewise, the title of the Instagram collage series ‘Wellness’ (January, 2017) is a purposeful misinterpretation of a term associated with Instagram lifestyle trends. ‘Wellness’ appropriates images and hashtags from the platform that it critiques, playing a disassociation game between each hashtag and image, taking the viewer along a hashtag wordsnake.

References to online food and lifestyle trends such as clean eating and wellness, feature alongside references to the legacy of conceptual and performance art. Worth’s performance to video for the Instagram piece, ‘Economics of the Kitchen (an A to Z)’ (2018) echoes Martha Rosler’s, ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’ (1975); reimagining Rosler’s work for the age of Web2.0 and #foodporn. Similarly, ‘The Artist’s Presence’ (2018), (Worth’s first Augmented Reality artwork, made with support from Ian Truelove and Field Design), explicitly references Marina Abramović’s performance ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010) in order to question notions of ‘presence’ in the digital age.