Small Town at the Edge of Cyberspace

Make Room Los Angeles is pleased to present Small Town at the Edge of Cyberspace, Bix Archer’s first solo venture with the gallery. 

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Bix Archer has long been fascinated by the unique cultural microcosms of the region. Her recent work posits an intricate intersection between painting and the digital, taking as a starting point the sensory metaphors utilized by early computer users. Her paintings often utilize the landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area— which is indelibly linked to the landscapes of the internet and capital— as a referent of personal memory and cultural symbolism.  Of particular influence for Archer are the Bay Area Figurative Movement and the art and architecture collective Ant Farm, both of which shaped visual narratives of the Bay at a moment of extreme cultural flux.

"Small Town at the Edge of Cyberspace" takes its name, in part, from Cliff Figallo's 1993 essay on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, and the relationship between online communities and the real-world places they were situated in. In the following body of work and its accompanying text, Archer draws together work she made over the past year, examining the metaphors early internet users in the Bay Area deployed to describe their experiences of the web. Archer futher dissects these diverging streams of cultural understanding that occurred in the 1960s and 70s through the current tech-dominated landscape of contemporary San Francisco.