Video Aquarium Sculptures challenges what it means to exhibit media art at this juncture, reflecting and confusing distinctions between materials – and thus the boundary between between “fine art” and “media art” as it has historically inhered. Sculpture, video, photography and painting are intermixed across these works to reflect media’s changing materiality at a historical point of inflection. Aquatic imagery – familiar from Nam Jun Paik’s TV sculptures and Acconci’s essay as much as from electronics shop retail displays – recurs across these explorations, the “fishbowl space” of the monitor restaged literally throughout three suites of format-defying sculptures.

A series of television monitors, growing slimmer as they get more contemporary, schematize the screen’s decreasing depth. The same trend is explored across sculptures that call themselves “videos”, comprised of canvases on stretcher bars printed with static images of aquariums depicted on screens of varying size and vintage. Alongside, a group of wall-mounted vitrines with plexiglass fronts hold the frames of destroyed TVs scavenged from the streets – the cast-off residue of a shift in household media consumption habits. Screen prints on the plexiglass fronts and wooden backs of the vitrines produce an animation effect as a viewer walks past – a kind of analogue video, gesturing towards early media art techniques. The resulting 4D media-archaeological deep-dive diagrams the evolution of hardware and art historical discourses alike, its deliberately convoluted claims suffused with a vaudeville, slapstick spirit.