Meet the curator: Joshua Citarella

As we count down the weeks until [REDACTED], we’re excited to preview some of the new work happening at Metalabel.

One new area of focus: curators. In the weeks and months ahead, you’ll meet and hear from several new curators we’re working with to support more artists on Metalabel. Today’s first curator introduction: Josh Citarella.

Josh Citarella is an artist and writer known for his podcasts, research, and visual artwork. After participating in a half-dozen Metalabel releases (including his Class Fantasy card game, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, Forever Magazine, and the Do Not Research anthologies), Josh reached out to express an interest in helping other artists have a similar experience with Metalabel. We were happy to accept.

We invited Josh to share what compelled him to reach out, and where he sees the creative world today. Have something you’re interested in releasing on Metalabel and putting in front of Josh? Reach out: hello@metalabel.com

Hello from Josh Citarella

Hey Gamers,

I'm Joshua Citarella, artist and internet culture writer. You might know me online from my podcast and newsletter — or offline from seeing my work in galleries and museums. This fall, I'm joining Metalabel for some curatorial projects that I'm excited to share with all of you.

If you're at all familiar with my work, you'll know that I've been at the forefront of experimental and alternative models for funding artistic practices. Coincidentally, this is also the title and topic of my profile on ArtNet's Art Angle podcast: The New Style of Artist Career. From UV Production House, my viral Etsy store with Brad Troemel, to Patreon and Substack, I've meaningfully explored ways for artists to forge their own independent careers without being reliant on big donors.

During all of this, I began to realize that the audience I was making work for wasn't billionaire collectors but was, in fact, my peers. They knew how to appreciate it, they understood it the best and they cared about it the most. In the last few years, lots of ink has been spilled about the prolonged stagnation of art and creative spheres. For a variety of reasons, things feel a bit safe or boring and lack the thrill and excitement of a few years ago. This aesthetic conservatism is a direct result of financial precarity on behalf of artists. As more wealth concentrates in fewer hands, artists become increasingly reliant on big donors and must cater to the interests, tastes and bad opinions of a small group of elites. Under these conditions, artists become increasingly risk averse and are forced to rely on familiar, time tested strategies. Simply put, this is why everything gets forced into the shape of a painting because that's the only thing that can sell.

I want to see a creative scene that is thriving, artist-led and uncompromising with its creative risks and grand visions. For this to happen, we need to build new methods of support and distribution. We also need to find ways of making art affordable to the real audiences that actually “get it”.

From my background in fine art photography, I learned that the same image could be valued in radically different ways. For example, a unique 1/1 print that sold for $10,000 in a gallery, versus an edition of 100 that sold for $100 per print, each contained the same amount of value. They were the identical image but posited a radically different idea of who our work is intended for. Painting and sculpture are more complicated, but photographs and editioned prints can be very clear. If we want a creative scene that is bold and independent, we can build it ourselves by changing a few old assumptions.

Releases I’m curating

To kick off this series of fall curatorial projects, I invited my good friends Eva & Franco Mattes and Evan Roth, who are some of my favorite artists working at the intersection of art and tech.

“Deep Fried Half Cat”
By Eva & Franco Mattes
Art print on acid blotter paper

Eva & Franco Mattes are the progenitors of my artistic cohort, the post-internet generation. Among their extensive exhibition history you will find artworks dated years before these trends became mainstream. Eva & Franco invented many of the tropes we now see deployed when dealing with digital art in museum exhibitions. One of the highlights of my career was getting to show alongside them in 2016. Eva & Franco opened their solo exhibition on the ground floor of Carroll/Fletcher in London, as I opened my solo show in the downstairs basement (a fitting environment for a lifelong internet troll).

Their 2024 work, Deep Fried Half Cat, was originally produced as an edition of 100 for KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. The artists have made 28 editions available for purchase on Metalabel. These 19 x 19 cm prints are signed and numbered. They are printed with plant based food grade ink on un-dosed heavyweight blotting paper, the paper that was traditionally soaked in liquid LSD. (You can technically eat them but I don’t recommend it.) The print contains 900 perforated tabs.

Deep fried memes are a genre of extremely online posts in which images are run through dozens of filters to the point where they appear grainy, washed-out, and strangely colored. The origin of deep fried memes is unknown. It’s something that emerged organically through social media and has become synonymous with extensive internet use. Half Cat was deep fried by master chef Franziska Von Guten, a member of the Italian art collective Clusterduck, and printed by Caleb Kesey, the grandson of Ken Kesey, a luminary of the 1960's counter-culture who helped to popularize psychedelic drugs.

Evan Roth
Skyscapes: Berlin Diptych Print Edition
Limited edition art print

Evan Roth is an American artist based in Paris. Evan and I showed alongside one another in a co-presentation at the Armory Fair in New York back in 2017. I've long admired Evan's work, especially his highly influential series, Red Lines, that explores the physicality and material infrastructure of the web. Years before most of us were ready to critically discuss "the cloud", Evan was tracing internet cables across the globe and sea.

His series “Skyscapes” begin as photographs taken of the sky at sunrise and sunset. These images are then reconfigured with a custom software built by the artist that re-creates historic mapping projections. For centuries, cartographers have wrestled with the impossible problem of representing a curved surface on a flat screen or plane. Reversing this cartographic gaze, Roth produces images through historical mapping algorithms that date back 150AD. Skyscapes have been exhibited in a wide array of media and scales, often expanding to fill the entire room of a museum. These works have been exhibited internationally including Torino Foto Festival in Turin, Italy, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive in Modena, Italy, Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm Sweden, Rosa Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and many others.

The artist has produced an edition of 10 archival fine art prints on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Ultrasmooth paper, of which 8 remain available. Each print measures 305g 8.5cm x 13.5cm and comes mounted in 18cm x 24cm mattes.

These are a few of the many projects releasing with Metalabel this fall. You’ll be hearing more from me in the coming weeks as new works become available. Thanks for joining us on this journey. I’m looking forward to the fall program and I’m looking forward to an artist-led artworld.

— Josh Citarella