Josephine Meckseper Exhibition
The FLAG Art Foundation
This event has ended.
Josephine Meckseper employs window displays, vitrines, installations, photographs, films and magazines to draw a direct correlation to the way consumer culture defines subjectivity and sublimates the key instruments of individual political agency.
Meckseper presents new works focusing on retail environments and modernist concepts. Industrial reflective slatwalls, a staple of bargain store design, mirror the car dealerships of 11th Avenue. Chromed wheels, car headlights and logos flash across the videos, sculptures and cellophane-wrapped paintings, like detritus after a crash. The traditional allure of the automobile is undercut with its demise, giving the entire exhibition a destabilizing undercurrent of fear. Meckseper utilizes the staples of American Gothic (fluorescents, broken mirrors, black birds) accompanied by the incessant booming of the acid-house soundtracks of her films to further the feeling of immanent danger that penetrates the space.
Strikingly, the work draws parallels with modernism. Meckseper invokes a number of the classic forms of color, line and shape of high modernism and abstraction. The strong rectilinear lines of the vitrines, all steel and glass, recall Mies Van Der Rohe. Like the auto industry, modernism too represented a twentieth-century idealism of essentialism and clarity in both art and life. In her invocation of its forms, Meckseper suggests that the hard-edged lines of essentialism in art are undergoing the same reconsideration as the American auto industry. The exhibition portrays a new reality where identity is no longer dialectic, and where past stalwarts of power and hegemony crumble and recombine in the fragmenting landscape of contemporary life.
Media
Schedule
from February 23, 2011 to May 26, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-02-23 from 18:00 to 20:00