Projecting Identity Through Objects
The Art of Identity - An art essay by Ernesto Artillo | Pepe Jeans
6 OBJECTS - Projecting Identity Expressions
Artist Research:
Paula Zuccotti
Time Capsule: Allegories of Shanghai
From the items found in our homes, to the tools we use at work, we surround ourselves with objects necessary for our existence in todays world.As part of a wider global project, I travelled to Shanghai, one of China’s most diverse cities, in an attempt to explore an idea that we can make sense of someones life, by viewing the objects they touch throughout a day.
The short film Objects in Shanghai was created for the exhibition showing us the making of the photographs and behind the scene of the six citizens I met and whose stories I told by simply showing EVERY THING they TOUCH in a single day.
House Of Dreams
Starting in 1998, The House Of Dreams is a project conceived by Stephen Wright and his former partner Donald Jones. The project was born from Stephen’s desire to create something permanent, something that will far outlive him. Donald passed away two years into the project and Stephen’s parents sadly soon followed. Stephen found himself alone and this fueled the latter years of this ongoing project. Stephen began creating a “new” family within the house, not as a replacement, but to help create a sense of belonging.
He compares the building of The House Of Dreams to the building of an intimate human relationship. His sculptures, everything contained within the house, he likens to giving birth to a child. Wright claims to have never felt truly at home in the bustling city that is London. Born on a farm in the suburbs, he’s moved closer to London for work, and his home, the living, breathing artwork he resides in, is his comfort zone.
Though the house is largely a personal diary of Wright’s life, there have been a number of added narratives donated by visitors. Hair, teeth, ashes, anything of meaning. He refuses to clean anything he finds or is given to him and incorporates all items as-is.
The museum of everything
An astonishing exhibition of art objects selected and curated by The Museum of Everything—the world’s first wandering institution for the untrained, unintentional, undiscovered and unclassifiable artists of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Keeper
an exhibition dedicated to the act of preserving objects, artworks, and images, and to the passions that inspire this undertaking. A reflection on the impulse to save both the most precious and the apparently valueless, it brings together a variety of imaginary museums, personal collections, and unusual assemblages, revealing the devotion with which artists, collectors, scholars, and hoarders have created sanctuaries for endangered images and artifacts. In surveying varied techniques of display, the exhibition also reflects on the function and responsibility of museums within multiple economies of desire.
Martin Wong/Danh Vo
At the core of Gallery 3, and giving the exhibition its title, is Danh Vo’s I M U U R 2 (2013). A room-sized installation, Vo’s work gathers the personal belongings—thrift store bric-a-brac, keepsakes, and rare items such as scrolls—of the artist Martin Wong, who died of an HIV-related illness in 1999. I M U U R 2 purposefully confuses the line dividing Vo and Wong’s authorship, positioning them as kindred artistic spirits, a nod from Vo to Wong, one generation to the next. The installation is also an expanded portrait of Wong, encapsulating the ways in which he learned about the world and what objects can communicate about their owners. The title, I M U U R 2, stems from a catchphrase that would often appear on Wong’s works and business cards, a slogan suggesting a blurring of the boundaries that separate one person from another, of the singular and the shared. In the context of the exhibition, and employed as its title, I M U U R 2 reminds us that as individuals we are inextricably linked to one another, the relationships we forge extending far beyond our personal circumstances.
The Cookie Jars Of Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was an avid collector of cookie jars, for example, alongside a wealth of other stuff, but was utterly unconcerned with the preservation or the display of items he bought, instead preferring to purchase objects and then abandon them to hordes of stuff in his home. Similarly, Hirst’s archive of medical memorabilia, skulls, and an enormous taxidermy lion were purchased largely in order for him to “explore the psyche of his collector,” which adds an interesting new aspect to ongoing arguments about his work as being made partly according to how sellable it might be.
hanne darboven