The exhibition Images Rights will include three new series of works that expand upon Cirio’s concept of Internet Photography, with a particular focus on the economic, legal, and semantic values of photos circulating online.

Cirio’s new works explore various modes of appropriation to address the political economy of images. Rather than authorship, these artworks problematize the ownership, liability, and social responsibility of the production and distribution of photos on the Internet. His artworks inquire into the need for regulations, fairness, and ethics in the economy of images, at a time when photos on the Internet drive negative social values, outrageous financial speculations, and monopolies of knowledge.

How we see images extends beyond the visual field. The images in Cirio’s works are constrained, performed, and bound by legal, financial, and linguistic devices that transform their value and meaning. Cirio’s new series Attention, Property, and Derivatives each examine, respectively: images as attention economy, images as capital, and images as finance.

The series Attention appropriated photos by influencers promoting controversial products without disclosing them as paid advertisements. The compositions make use of the original photographs and enlarged body parts, expressions, poses, and products.

Property adopts the semantics of appropriation art through transforming images into compositions of colored shapes and texts, which merge with the prints of the original photos appropriated from Getty’s websites.

Derivatives is composed of hundreds of images and records of artworks appropriated from Sotheby’s auctions to turn them into further financial derivatives. The photos of the artworks sold for the highest price at the auctions are printed on canvas with their prices overlaying the images.

Images Rights

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