artcodes.com - emily chang - consume/produce

Friday, April 09, 1999

consume/produce

This was my graduate thesis show - a window installation at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (CEPA) Gallery in the theatre district in Buffalo, NY, featuring two of my illuminated sculptures and two accompanying duratrans lightbox pieces.

consume|produce, April 1999

Artist: Emily Chang
Thesis show, MFA.
Type: Mixed media installation, solo show.
Exhibited: Center for Perceptual and Exploratory Art (CEPA) Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2000.

Movie is a Real Player stream.

Statement:

My recent sculptural work with commercial objects, including bottles of colored hair gels, deals with exaggerations and parodies of consumer culture; aiming at the hyperreal, in which appearance, material, and image become more fantastic than the substance itself. While displays of surplus and choice attract, the amorphous identity is packaged into color-coded, categorized, and organized rows. The gel, in its mundane and mysterious roles, becomes a kind of mutable substitute for product and image. In stimulus, a chrome diamond-plated steel truck box houses rainbow-colored rows of bottled hair gel, illuminated from within the box. Special effects combine to reference product display, advertising hype, and image branding, but beneath the shiny veneer of the displays lies an admittedly ironic self-consciousness about the excesses of commercialism and image.

Pared down to effects, stimulus attempts to isolate the visual cues and abandon the media message, while still acknowledging that image-making is always at work. In one sense, the yellow amorphous substance of source becomes a kind of associative autobiographical reading. In another sense, the rows of yellow gel "battery cells" lining the inside of the durable black plastic "housing," become both power source and precious substance. A mix of mysterious and mundane terms scroll across a LED sign, a seemingly urgent message, yet really a list of actual gel ingredients.

My generation of consumption is about being aware, and being amused, by image-selling, media marketing, and corporate attempts to manipulate. I think of my work as hybrid transmissions, operating from a "re-mixed" sensibility, conveyed through stylistic filters, and commenting on the visual language of consumer culture and media advertising. Oldenburg once referred to art as memory, and to the degree that memory distorts fact, displaces time, invokes familiarity, and blends into fantasy, my brand of art attempts to investigate the visual cues that make this so, and the arenas in which this occurs.

e. chang
march 1999

Posted by emily chang on 04/09 at 04:26 PM
Filed under eProjects • Gel world • Sculpture/installation • Permalink • Tell a friend
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