David Shapiro "Money is no Object"
Sue Scott Gallery
This event has ended.
For the entire year of 2010, David Shapiro redrew and repainted all of his bills and receipts.
Conceived as a year-long drawing, Money is No Object manages to slow down the world by painstakingly scrutinizing the banal details and monotony of modern life. Redrawing account numbers and bar codes — humanized with handmade mistakes — the work reveals pathos, unforeseen rhythms, rituals and beauty, as it strives to reclaim a fill-in-the-blank life from the forces of corporate reduction.
While the specifics of autobiography are unavoidable — in one passage, the viewer witnesses the irony of Shapiro’s paycheck placed side by side with parking tickets, which instantly soak up half his income - the work can be read as myth, of a struggling artist, and as a narrative, of a father, and a family trying to survive in New York at the turn of the millennium. Honest and bittersweet, at once embarrassingly personal and completely commonplace, Money Is No Object ultimately becomes a reflective surface for viewers to consider the fine print of their own lives.
As a visual artist, David Shapiro is known for making work, which infuses the formal ambiguity of minimal sculpture with humor and personal meaning. Casting faces in tofu, and potatoes in bronze, archiving ephemera of daily life, (he once famously saved his garbage for two years and restocked the results in a gallery), Shapiro misapplies materials and techniques of institutional collection and display to explore the borders of art and life and catalogue the failures of modernism.
[Image: David Shapiro Ink, gouache and color pencil on vellum, 18 in. x 30 ft.]
Media
Schedule
from May 07, 2011 to June 19, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-05-07 from 18:00 to 20:00