Artie Vierkant

Born in 1986, Artie Vierkant is an American artist based in the United States. He studied photography at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2011. He began the Image Objects series in 2011, and the work was introduced internationally through exhibitions including Reference Gallery that year and his first New York solo show at Higher Pictures in 2012.^*1

Vierkant’s central concerns are the instability of the photographic object, the movement of images between gallery space and network circulation, authorship after digital reproduction, and the point at which documentation becomes a work in its own right. Image Objects begins as a digital file and is produced as machine-cut UV prints on Sintra or aluminum composite panels, so that a flat photographic surface appears to possess sculptural depth.^*2 Vierkant treats documentation images not as neutral records but as new works, digitally altering official installation photographs himself. Each documentation image can become a version rather than a secondary copy of a stable object. His statement that nothing is in a fixed state gives a concise account of the project’s method.^*2 The work belongs to the early 2010s, when exhibitions were increasingly encountered through blogs, social media, and online documentation rather than only through physical gallery experience. Its historical significance lies in making the collapse between physical artwork and online image part of the structure of the work itself.^*2

Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology positions Image Objects as a project that helped shape discussion around post-internet art, presenting the works as sculptural objects between physical form and mediated image. Higher Pictures introduced Vierkant’s New York exhibition Initial as being at the forefront of a new form of visual art. In photographic history, the work matters because it redefines the photographic print as only one state within a chain of digital file, object, installation image, altered documentation, and online derivative.^*1