Bix Archer: 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. 

“When the internet as we know it was first taking shape, the hippies and hackers who logged on needed language to describe this new entity they were navigating. It was a wilderness, a vehicle, a bulletin board, a community, a cafe, a letter on the kitchen table. It was their real world, the world of the Bay Area, but also not. The Bay seeped into the space. And this internet spilled out from behind the screen and worked its way back into the landscape and the people.

“This place has always done this—shaped the work of painters and sculptors and programmers and acid heads, gone in and then filtered back out. All that they produced, piling up and bumping into one another. Leaving traces, a small groove in memory, often only noticeable when you’re really looking for it, like running your hand over the smooth surface of the table to find the dent where you hit your tooth as a kid.

"To take the bus past the houses up behind my high school and see Diebenkorn’s Ingleside. To visit Aquatic Park and think of Joan Brown, the lycra-capped heads of her swimmers. To walk the dogs in the Berkeley Hills, past an empty lot, occasionally occupied by a deer or two, where David Park’s house once stood.

“In college, whenever I felt homesick, I would go visit the room on the 3rd floor of the museum near me, where Diebenkorn’s Girl With Cups hung. There’s nothing in the painting special to the Bay—a girl, reaching for a cup; a stack of books; a window; blue, gray, siena. But it could be nowhere else, could not have come to be anywhere else. You could feel it. It was a line to home. I would stand before it, and feel myself back there.”

 -Bix Archer