Digital Superhighway

Seated at a lobby table with a hot chocolate in Conwell Coffee Hall in the Financial District, Paige K. Bradley (who uses the name Paige K. B. for her artist projects) confesses to me that she finds conspiracy theory quite charming. Secrets hold no place for Los Angeles-born, New York-based K. B. whose practice adopts the literary form of such paranoid delusions as a style, in which historical or cultural references and associations previously separated are arbitrarily related together.

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This speculative thinking proved essential to the artist’s practice, as seen in her Gramercy International Prize-winning booth with Blade Study at last month's The Armory Show, which followed her delightfully psychotic solo show “Of Course, You Realize, This Means War” at the gallery last year. It also appears in her writing about culture—see her Artforum slant on QAnon, which incisively dissects the right-wing paranoia's strange temporality. This dual identity of artist and writer is a trope she is expanding upon this fall as an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. There she’ll debut an interdisciplinary project of embroidery, writing, drawing, and installation for its annual exhibition in May. Now, the daring artist is ready to zoom in.

With her signature strawberry blonde hair and an eclectic wardrobe of pieces from Women’s History Museum and Gauntlett Cheng, K. B. leaves a lasting impression. She speaks with swift cadence when she ruminates about the state of the world, as she subsequently revises, retracts, and adds appendix to her sentiments. I first met her last year at Maxwell Graham Gallery for the launch of her book Drive It All Over Me, 2023. The text, which resides at the flirtatious border between autofiction and art criticism, was born from a commission by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda to respond to Bad Driver, 2021, their clinical collection of anti-Asian tropes. In it she explores post-conceputal artist Jack Goldstein’s intentional misreading of philosophical texts in search of a high purpose toward the end of his career before his suicide. For her essay contribution to the Swiss Institute catalog of Jan Vorisek's 2021 exhibition “No Sun” (forthcoming in December), her own words lend themself to the slipperiness between writing about a digital image and writing about the self.

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The 35-year-old Rhode Island School of Design printmaking graduate only studied at the storied CalArts for a year prior but brought Californian conceptualism with her to New England and then downtown Manhattan. Working within the genealogy of West Coast conceptual art that analyzes the structure of mass culture and flows of capital that sustain it, she unleashes the anxiety of our hyper-digital moment with cryptic signs and symbols that, rather than admit our defeat, tirelessly defend meaning against the threat of its mediated dissolution. Fearlessly hitting at the apparatus of meaninglessness from within puts the artist shoulder to shoulder with giants such as Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, and Cosima von Bonin—a literal proximity, in the case of CUTE, a group exhibition at the Somerset House, London earlier this year, which will travel to a venue in Europe for summer 2025. 

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Given her first foray into art-making was writing, K. B. thinks about text as malleable, a form that takes on affective materiality by way of circulation. "T.S. Eliot, who read a lot of concrete poetry, did not care for communicative efficacy, but rather was concerned with the gesture of communication itself,” she tells me. “I found his writing close to my heart." The same can be said about the artist's relationship to language in her paintings.

If her writing can be said to both interject and deject the singular voice of enclosed authorship, then K. B.’s art takes a further leap of faith. It’s unafraid of the conceptual commitment of proliferating into first person plural, where codes of conduct are whimsically and liberally reproduced and rearranged. In her paintings and installations, an abundance of text appears, speaking to something on the verge of public consciousness, all the while saying nothing conclusive at all. A coalition of claims operating at competing intervals without a definitive narrative is put forth. Words move at parallel lanes but, at moments, collapse into each other.

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Recently, she has been working through her own attraction to anime and its propensity to borrow freely from other cultures—the "vaguely European boarding school" of Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) comes to mind for her. She cites anime’s flatness and ritualized structure of repetition as a fitting frame for her intervention into the shifting distance between the high-resolution of art production and the anticipation of low-resolution image circulation. “I used to be anxious about decries of cultural appropriations, but now I believe these anime production studios would welcome my appropriation as they themselves have a loose relationship to copyright as well,” she admits. “Does anime not reflect the actual speed of how images move?” I ask. The answer is affirmative.

For the artist, the gesture of digital compression does not belie an image's status as unreal, but rather it is part of the conditions of consuming contemporary art, often taking the form of scrolling on Instagram and TikTok or speed-walking at an art fair. This is why she painstakingly attends to details of embroidery and textured, almost tactical gradients whilst being certain that they will become flattened in the high-speed collating of online discourse.

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As is often the case with conspiracy theories, the artist's works treat time as a non-linear material that can be manipulated freely. For example, the painting Only in a world of pure (imagination) speculation, 2024—from her award-winning Armory booth—begins with archival research into the history of Cold War cybernetic technology and departs into an allegorical tale of cross-cultural and intertextual communication within a given system of power. The center imagery of a shadowy puppet emerging from the edges of cyberspace and releasing origami cranes aligns with Eliot's high-modernist strategy of destabilizing time and place, resulting in mystical, murky atmospheres.

The economical and psychical functions of speculation meet in Jester's Privilege / Proud Punk Split EP, 2024, a painting that affords the titular archetype credibility. The jester (a reminder of how those who purport conspiracy theories are often deemed laughable) is seen juggling embroidered books atop a canvas ornamented like a bound book. The books are suspended in the air, thus truth is deferred. Such ideas are afforded extra allure in today’s political crisis. In Accelerate Dog, 2024, the infamous meme dog who used to merely accept his fate of destruction now proudly advocates for cultural, economical, and political transformation, operating at full speed.

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While her ideas are rapidly spinning, K. B. is taking the time to sit with her thoughts and regroup. “After a few demanding projects, I am excited to slow down and really consider power as a real thing and a mythology,” she says. This year, the artist-writer will be in the good company of greats from Andrea Fraser to Gregg Bordowitz, who share her devotion to the intense zone of ambiguity between performance and sincerity that produces change. As her dual identities as Bradley the writer and K.B. the artist continue, a nonlinear investigation of revisionist approaches toward cultural alienation materializes, with a perverse mixture of good faith and bad faith, fiction and fact, sincerity and irony. The digital superhighway might lose some details while trafficking images, but it throws out the obfuscation of power along the way.