Flaming Hot Mountain Dew Damaged in Shipping, Devirtualized

Brandon Bandy (2021 - 2025)

Bandy’s work emerges from the hyperreal terrain where images eclipse objects, and sign value trumps materiality. This “devirtualized” energy drink – a corporate collab around a memefied flavor, here producing a stubbornly material, badly packaged, and heavily bruised, thing – hints at the messy material substrate beneath the spectacle of marketing. As neoliberal logics push brands toward ever more extreme and abstracted forms of attention-grabbing, Bandy traces their residue: objects that slip between meme, commodity, and material matter. Like much of his practice, the piece points to the perverse pleasures and glitches that arise when ideology becomes an all-pervasive, hyperreal ambience, yet still leaves behind traces that resist full absorption into the virtual.

Brandon Bandy

― Artist

Brandon Bandy is a Long Beach, California-based artist and publisher whose practice examines the conditions of artistic production within the dominance of online platforms and the erosion of cultural institutions. Engaging with ideas of the virtual, visual conventions, and memetics, his works often emerge from contemporary folklore and metadata, shifting form through stages of mediation. By foregrounding site, the lens, and processes of circulation, Bandy creates unfixed works that interrogate how meaning is constructed, reframed, and reproduced in digital culture. He co-operates Special Effects, a publishing studio dedicated to producing art books and editions, and organizes exhibitions at the Los Angeles gallery Timeshare together with Rachel Jackson. Bandy holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside.

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