Installation of "Catfish" at Anat Ebgi Gallery.

Installation of “Catfish” at Anat Ebgi Gallery.

I’ve never been catfished, and I haven’t seen the movie Catfish either. There’s a fear of online identity that is perpetuated by the internet, that place where people say things that aren’t fact. There are horrifying catfishing cases like one in which a Tuscaloosa woman created a fake Facebook account named Tre “Topdog” Ellis in order to stalk the online life of her live-in niece, Marissa Williams, who had been inviting random men over to the house, and also blocked her aunt. Marissa started talking to “Topdog” as if he were a regular guy, asking him to come over and get drunk and pay off her phone bill, but things got real dark when she asked him to also “kidnap” her and murder her aunt and her aunt’s fiancé if she intervened. The cops came, Marissa went to jail, and the catfish’s true identity was revealed. This sort of case is pretty rare, involves naïve people, and also discounts the ways that the internet can be both healthy and important for those who frequent it.

The idea of playing with fake identities on social media seems like it could be ripe subject matter for a group show aptly named Catfish at Anat Ebgi Gallery featuring work by all female artists Petra Cortright, Kate Steciw, Letha Wilson and Margo Wolowiec. But the actual show concept and the work in it don’t exactly line up.

First, viewers are presented with a ironicly vague ‘stream-of-conscience’ catfish-y story in the press release, which actually reads more like a sad and inaccurate lust story between a dude and a lady, in which the two start talking and then she goes to meet him at a hotel in Arizona and he is not there. That’s not a case of mistaken catfish identity, persay, but more like a naïve, not-realistic portrayal of a young woman who meets a guy via some Facebook messaging and doesn’t know who he is even though of all the social networks out there, Facebook is the only one that is constantly under fire for its real name policy.

Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/912507-exhibit-catfish-anat-egbi-gallery#KLmjo4W4hHHEO0Zo.99