UC Riverside

As neoliberal ideologies have dominated the past four decades we find ourselves navigating the hyperreal, a condition where images have overtaken objects, sign value has undermined material value, and distortions of the lens have colonized our vision. Within online platforms information has become flattened, inconceivable violence appears alongside inconsequential clickbait, and profit motives have excised any liberatory potential. Conspiracy and its theories run rampant as old narratives are abandoned and austerity breeds alienation. Corporate entities resort to more desperate and obscene forms of marketing logic to compete for the attention of an increasingly precarious consumer class. Bandy’s work considers these events through their material residue, brand collaborations, memetic objects, conspiratorial artifacts, and sites of occurrence. Engaging with memetic image culture, the works are unfixed. Objects and images shift form, each version further mediated than the last, pointing us towards the pleasures and perversions of an increasingly virtual world.