Artist: Kevin Gallagher
Exhibition title: square shape faint aroma
Venue: Lodos Gallery, Mexico City
Date: February 6- March 21, 2015
Photography: Courtesy of Lodos Gallery
Hey Fran,
I’ve finally gotten around to writing some notes about the exhibition. 5 am Barcelona time.
So I think the first thing to discuss would be the recurring use of Alibaba.com material throughout the installation. One definite thread within the exhibition is a spatialization or visual poetic display of a certain sublime horror of commerce/con- sumerism available in 21st century virtual marketplaces. I locate this horror in the potential transmission and also transmutability of just about anything, all available to you when navigating such a site. For instance, one can easily drift from viewing traders of stuffed animal shrimp toys produced in Morocco to live mantis shrimp sourced in Thailand to a shrimp infused body wash produced in Canada to an animatronic sea-themed merry go round made in China – all available at your door and in bulk for the right price. The exact content, methods, or point of extraction becomes ambiguous, the names and photos of people and factories, potential audience, are obscure, they are very open to interpretation. The language on the site is descriptive and all products must undergo a matrix of categorization: live, dead, frozen, mechanical.
And suddenly my viewing position – as a subject navigating the e-commerce website – becomes not the relationship to a single product but the layering and after images of the search. These products attach themselves to one another like a chain: a particular attribute of one item becomes grafted onto the next. It’s like this naviga- tion through the site is actually a metabolization of the site: a condensation of a pro- cess into a single nutrient rich lump.
All for now,
Kevin
