Born in Philadelphia in 1979, Josh Kline is one of a raft of American artists at the height of their powers who examine contemporary reality with thrilling effect. Through his sculptures and installations generated by a digitized creative process, he uses technology as a tool to reflect society’s media bombardment. His portrayal of the sufferings of the modern 21st century is highly stimulating and thought-provoking, highlighting how deeply immersed, perhaps lost, we are in technology.

The Lisson Gallery at 508 West 24th Street, New York, presents Josh Kline’s first solo exhibition in partnership with the gallery, titled Social Media, which deftly explores his views on media overload.

Kline criticizes the ubiquitous, intense digital environment and our subservience to technology, illuminating the resulting moments of despair. This show includes his most recent work, focusing on the “lens” of our mobile devices. The mobile phone symbolizes the simplicity of life.

As our lives become defined by the choices we make with a click on a small screen, and how screen use is detrimental to our senses, this collection emphasises the vertigo we encounter, as if the gap between reality and illusion is simply too much. The alerts, warnings, and messages—all the signals that intervene in our lives—narrow our view to an unseen threat ahead. Our imagination is shaped by the anxiety that arises from a proliferation of screens.

Kline’s works are laid out in a confined, occluded venue divided into booths between white walls. From the outside, there are no signs of art but a silent blankness. Yet upon stepping into space, the journey begins. The space acts as a precursor to a primary experience in art and media confrontation, guiding viewers to focus on themselves and the central idea of the “self-portrait” in the present.

Among the collections, his Leveraged Assets and Professional Default Swaps extend his famous Blue Collars series, where he interviewed blue-collar workers about their jobs, manual skills, labour, lives, and aspirations, portraying them through 3D scanning and printing. For this piece, Kline modelled body parts of himself — limbs and decapitated heads — and placed them on desks and chairs imitating his own office furnishings, placing himself in the category of labour. Deteriorating himself may be visually repulsive, yet the impact of realistic self-segmentation truly engages our attention. On the table are keyboards, iPhones, and, in the context of Amazon, bill statements, bonding himself with the workers as he uses the same services to order tools and supplies for his work. His self-placement in the middle of the experiences of blue-collar workers captures the disparities and hardships of labour. In the case of delivery workers, labour becomes an overlooked aspect, concealed behind screens. Consumers often obsess over delivery status without considering the immense effort and pressure involved in fulfilling their requests.

The mobile phone appears frequently in this collection as a symbol of confinement. Fake statements, bank accounts, and credit cards are imprinted on the screen, showing the financial precarity not only of artists but of working-class people in general. This device links to Kline’s expertise in digital technology, while his artistic visualisation projects the repulsiveness of obsessive digital dependence in modern times.

Kline’s digitisation of people and himself incorporates a specific process: 3D photogrammetry modelling. He uses a rig of 130–160 cameras that capture a single photo simultaneously, creating a 3D photogrammetric image on the computer. The ink applied is combined into the plastic, with no actual paint involved.

This complexity and intricacy in his digitisation is best demonstrated in the installation Mid-Career Artist. This sculpture, modelled after the artist himself, shows him crouched in a foetal position recorded by photogrammetry in 360 degrees. An extension of his famous Unemployment series, which featured middle-class white-collar workers as the subject of societal and economic burdens, the sculpture shows people wrapped in plastic, mimicking trash bags, symbolising how professionals or labourers are treated as disposable. In this particular work, Kline implicates himself, involving his own body as a tool. This is a bold move, as he begins to establish himself as one of the people influenced by his distorted, media-heavy interpretation of the world.

“Digitalisation” may sound mundane and perhaps redundant. However, regardless of how we project the world through media, Josh Kline uses these norms in his creative investigation as a mirror of potential futures. He unleashes a siren wake-up call, confronting us with what we’re losing in slow motion, dragging us half conscious from deathless channels and screens, urging us to switch off and reignite unmediated, unmonitored human connection once more. Timely and compelling, I recommend you catch it live while you can.