GRETCHEN ANDREW

1988 born in Los Angeles (USA), lives and works in London (GBR) and Utah (USA)

2010 B.S. in Information Systems (Honors), Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (USA)

2006 – 2009 Intuit, Software Engineer

2010 – 2012 Google, People Technology Manager

2013 – 2017 Billy Childish Studio Apprenticeship

The American artist Gretchen Andrew overwhelms with her opulently overfilled, loud collages of stickers, plastic containers, artificial flowers and more. The actual material of her works, on the other hand, are algorithms that are unmasked within the architecture of search engines as tools and expressions of power structures. The artist programs incoming search queries under certain keywords over a period of weeks, so that not an actual “Contemporary Art Auction Record”, a “Map of the EU”, or even “the next American president” are found, but one of her own works.Paradoxically, she thus counters the formal abundance and seemingly untamed visual chaos of her works with a virtual world in terms of content,

which she organizes, orders, and ultimately falsifies in her own favor. In a playful, even jocular manner, the self-proclaimed “Search Engine Artist” emphatically exposes the manipulability of Google and Co. In this way, the primarily commercially organized sovereignty of information on the Internet is taken ad absurdum by glittering, iridescent, supposedly femininely conceived visual worlds.

Niklas Koschel