Wilderness of Mirrors

Work by Catherine Mulligan, Dimitri Karakostas, Jackson O Brasky, Jenna Bliss, Siobhan Ekeh, and Tommy Mishima.

“Karakostas might be called a “research artist,” a term that here means more than reading several Wikipedia articles and posting a. For Wilderness of Mirrors, he drew on material obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and the CIA’s Reading Room. He studied how the CIA researches and assembles profiles of individuals, then turned those same methods inward to conduct his own, ahem, ‘investigations.’ That initial archive was translated into brute physicality with tape-transfer photographs, screenprints smudged with fingerprints, and trading cards distributed freely so viewers could bring a piece of the horror home with them. The work follows the paranoid logic found in Don DeLillo’s novels and Mark Lombardi’s drawings: trace enough names, images, dates, and associations, and some hidden structure may begin to reveal itself. Karakostas channels that impulse into books and physical accumulations in which coincidence becomes method, every fragment appears potentially significant, and each new piece of evidence makes the story less – not more – certain.”

ArtForum also called it a ‘Must See,’ for whatever that’s worth.