AGE: 35
BASED: New York
Paige K. B. is an artist and a writer, but conspiracy is her art form. Like paintings or sculptures, or fantasy realms, you can make them from scratch. In one memorable kinetic work, shown around the first anniversary of Jan. 6, she reprised the green-on-yellow Gadsden Flag flown by libertarians and far-right wingnuts (“Don’t Tread On Me!”) using a swimming plastic frog in a shallow pan of urine-yellow liquid. “I’m interested in the form, not the content,” K. B. says on the phone from her studio, which she moved to the Whitney ISP this fall. “There is no content.” She points out that QAnon started as a joke, but made itself a movement.
Conspiracy is a container and its contents could be anything. Accordingly, K. B.’s exhibitions can be bewildering to the uninitiated. Connections leap among varied paintings, drawings, and installation elements. Her recent booth at the Armory Show, with Blade Study, featured a thick, realistic painting of an iPhone case, an enlarged painting of her business card from her days as an editor at Artforum, and an ambiguous mixed-media painting flecked with cherry blossoms and fragments of backwards text. The work is highly personal, says K. B., but “personal material is always someone else’s found material. So you have to treat the personal as if you’re holding it at a distance, like it’s an object and you’re examining it and thinking, How do you use this?”
Pantone’s quirky “color of the year” has become another of K. B.’s materials. One wall of a 2023 showraged Tangerine Tango, a shade of aggressive mud, which nods obliquely to the year of its reign, 2012. “It’s important to bring in things that are totally impersonal and totally outside of me,” K. B. says. “Something like, you know, a trend.” She describes the way the absurd declaration of an annual color serves as a “bat signal” for companies to tint their products. The gimmick becomes true, and the form fills itself in.
