american flag, 2021

American Flag 1–3 is a sterile installation of three pedestals mounted with archival paper. Above each plinth, ink slowly drips from IVs. Over time, this performance reveals an abstracted image as red ink pools and cascades into blue puddles. Negative space completes the configuration, an inky rendering of the American flag. Jasper Johns’ seminal flag paintings, in particular Three Flags (1958), served as great inspiration to Wagenknecht during this period of study. Nested inside one another, Johns’ composition highlights the structure of the flag as an object as well as a national emblem. Wagenknecht echoes this approach by favouring process over end result, refiguring America drop by drop.

American Flag is presented at every day the same again, Addie Wagenknecht’s third solo exhibition at bitforms gallery. Wagenknecht frequently repurposes systems with an ethos of hacker culture, usurping materials—such as cosmetics, surveillance devices, Roombas, and pharmaceuticals—of their inherent function to encourage the tension between expression and the programmed role of devices. The artist has long examined elements of visibility and identity, and in the continuing tide of Covid-19 she positions this exhibition as an inquiry towards America as both a foreigner and a citizen. The pandemic acts as a lens and guiding structure for Wagenknecht’s studies from across the Atlantic.