Artists: June Crespo, Patrick Hough, Anna Franceschini
Exhibition title: Wild Things
Curated by: João Laia and Rosa Lléo
Venue: The Green Parrot, Barcelona, Spain
Date: October 10 – December 19, 2014
Photography: Roberto Ruiz Arguedas. Courtesy of The Green Parrot.
The Green Parrot presents Wild Things, the last chapter in a trilogy of exhibitions that brings together topics related to design, economy and sociology in an attempt to understand the shifting dynamics of human-object relationships.
Starting from The World of Interiors, which was followed by Unforeseen Changes, the three shows have reflected on the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time, and body. The title of the current show comes from Judy Attfield’s reflection on material culture studies: a distinction is made between what the author names as Design objects and everyday objects. If the former is assigned a modernist stance, charged with the purpose of improving the world through the production of new forms within mainstream discourse, the latter would be something produced by all of us in our daily living, the wild things, the kitschy, the commonplace.
In this sense, the exhibition addresses current questions related to the relation between the physical and the virtual, focusing on the body as the place where this encounter takes place. Post-photography has highlighted the problematic layers of the photographic medium; rather than producing analogous pictures, it now explores the virtual realm, where the so-called “real” is deconstructed. It is within our body that these immaterial images coalesce and return to a concrete form. Drawing also from Hans Belting’s take on the embedded relationship between society and images, Wild Things explores how the circulation of images impacts our engagement with objects and the world at large. In the words of Belting: “We live with images, we comprehend the world in images. And this living repertory of our internal images connects with the physical production of external pictures that we stage in the social realm. ”
By unpacking and exploring the way one makes sense of the world through physical elements and their representations, Wind Things reconsiders the dynamics at play between object and subject in the free flowing construction of the everyday. Things are made wild again, and so are we. Wild thing, you make my heart sing…
June Crespo, Daytime Regime
June Crespo, Daytime Regime
Patrick Hough, Object Interviews
June Crespo, Daytime Regime
June Crespo, Daytime Regime
Anna Franceschini, Before They Break, Before They Die, They Fly!
Anna Franceschini, Untitled (Almost lost)