For David Hanes’ second solo exhibition at Birch Contemporary, Toronto, he presents works selected from his weekly contributions to the Swiss art blog: We Find Wildness. An evolution of his ongoing ‘Aware’ series, Hanes’ We Find Wildness works comprise digitally altered installation images of international art exhibitions as photographed by Sophie Yerly, founder of the blog. 

The result of Hanes’ digital interventions is an exhibition view stripped entirely – or partly – of its artworks, creating a new document at the border of abstraction and representation. Hanes’ alterations question the conceptualisation, and presentation of art online, to both challenge the authority of the image and examine the dissolution of traditional boundaries between art, image, surface and documentation.

David Hanes (b.1987, Toronto) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He is a visual artist whose expanded sculptural practice examines the architecture of the Internet and the experience of art in the digital age. Hanes exhibits in both offline and online communities that recently include “TenderPixels.CorruptedFiles”, Birch Contemporary (Toronto), “psycho.gif”, Cosmos Carl (Online), “In a Good Shape”, Schwarzwaldalle (Basel), and “Are We Friends Yet?”, Intimate (Berlin). Commissions include a remixing of Frieze, NYC (2015) on artfcity.com and his weekly contributions to the Swiss art blog: we-find-wildness.com since July 2015. He is the founder of the cloud-based Later Gallery and a recipient of the TAC Individual Artists Grant.