Eighty dollar serums eight-hundred dollar crocs I may never own a home but at fifty I’ll still be hot at the plumb

Artists: Emily Grace Harrison, Theresa Hopkins, Nadya Isabella, Julia Kansas, Maddy Mathews, Claudia Rick, Nicholas Zirk

Exhibition title: Eighty dollar serums eight-hundred dollar crocs I may never own a home but at fifty I’ll still be hot

Curated by: Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Venue: the plumb, Toronto, Canada

Date: September 16 – October 13, 2022

Photography: all images copyright of LFdocumentation

Eighty dollar serums
eighth-hundred dollar crocs
I may never own a home
but at ffty I’ll still be hot

Millenials get a lot of shit for being childish, lazy, unaccomplished, and apathetic, when the fact of the matter is, the world is not structured to support our generational maturation. For the mass majority of Millennials, without the assistance of well-meaning boomer parents or the luck of being born into an extraordinarily wealthy and well connected family, to grow-up fully, or to engage with the activities and milestones associated with adulthood is a near impossible feat. As a generation we have been forced into a perpetual state of infantility and uncertainty.

If it has not yet arrived, we are certainly on the cusp of a neo-decadent era: self-driving electric cars running on high-density battery packs composed of lithium, cobalt, and copper mined by children in countries tens of thousands of kilometres away from where it actually becomes your problem. I don’t own a Tesla either, but the electrifed stones we all carry in our pockets–providing us with instant access to information and gratifcation as we’re charrioted around by indentured uber labourers–will eventually end up in a landfll, further contaminating water supplies and ecosystems. We’re all complicit, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc., etc.

3D-printed guns, artifcial intelligence, augmented reality, cloud computing, data mining, gene editing, robotic hearts, juuls, environmental collapse, famine, war, global pandemics, infation, civil unrest, the whole force majeure. We’re at the height of technological advancement and yet we are in hell.

None of us asked to be born between the years of 1985 and 1996, to witness 9/11 and near weekly mass casualty events, to graduate into the 2008 recession, or to live through an ongoing plague with no end in sight, punctuated by impending stagnation. Is it any fault of our own that we might want to escape, to live in our heads and rely on our imaginations?

Do a ritual, cast a spell
Attempt to see into the future
Just for a glimpse of our parents’ promise:
‘You can be whatever you want to be
when you grow up’

Go to school get a good job buy a house start a family becomes
Acquire debt while working multiple jobs eating kraft dinner for supper

Sitting beside a judgmental chihuahua who’s feasting on wild-caught freeze dried atlantic salmon
She has no idea scientists say we only have three to fve years left to avoid a catastrophic climate event
Check Co-Star scroll the SSENSE sale dismissing Apple News alerts without reading them It’s called manifestation, babes

Thank goodness for the six-step skincare routine and groupon-subsidised quarterly preventative botox. Even though Earth is burning, society is collapsing, and you still have no idea what a 401K actually is, you’re still baby faced and will be hotter than your parents at their age. We’re not irony-poisoned, capitalism is rotten and this planet is poisoned.colour the millennial experience.

Eighty dollar serums eight-hundred dollar crocs I may never own a home but at fifty I’ll still be hot, 2022, exhibition view, the plumb, Toronto

Emily Grace Harrison, Journey of my Shadow Witch, 2022, Perfume bottle, vase, cardboard, dowel, paint, Wizard of Oz figurine, zippers, spools, salt

Eighty dollar serums eight-hundred dollar crocs I may never own a home but at fifty I’ll still be hot, 2022, exhibition view, the plumb, Toronto

Julia Kansas, Woman with Apple Watch & Nipple Ring, 2022 glazed ceramic, 10 x 15 x 17 inches; Julia Kansas, Raw Chicken Wings, 2018, glazed ceramic, 3 x 1.25 x1 inches, 3 x 1.5 x 1 inches, 3.5 x 1.25 x 1 inches