Ed Fornieles: Modern Family, Chisenhale Gallery

The Artist
Young, British, LA-based Ed Fornieles is very much a contemporary artist. Not contemporary in the way that, say, Ai Wei Wei or Anthony Gormley might be said to be contemporary, but in the stricter sense that a contemporary artist addresses contemporary concerns through the most contemporary of mediums. He is “of the moment”, a product of our time and our technology. 
Fornieles mostly makes internet based art. Previous projects have been centred on Twitter (Maybe New Friends 2013), and Facebook (Dormdaze 2011).  Both projects share Fornieles’ fascination with new forms of popular entertainment and social media technologies. You could say that Fornieles is the closest thing we have to a pop artist: someone whose explorations of new media and the new sensibilities that they spawn appear to affirm the optimistic spiel given by the corporations that own them. And just like iconic pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton; Fornieles’ work is not the affirmation of pop culture that it appears to be.
The Exhibition
In Modern Family Fornieles uses the imagery of Pinterest, what he considers an aspirational online image-sharing platform, to explore what the archetype of the modern family living the good life might look like. The scenery in his installation is domestic and familiar whilst at the same time quietly distant and unsettling. Fornieles distorts scale and perspective whilst peppering his work with new technologies and high-spec interior design finishes. Sporadic performances by actors also bring the installation to life.
Central to the exhibition is a website created for the show which collects news feeds in real time and draws together live content from across social media. Using this as a shifting backdrop to the show, Fornieles animates the gallery by connecting it to the virtual reality which we throw ourselves into every day.