NOTHING EVER HAPPENS BUT THE WALLPAPER
Dorothea Tanning describes her hometown as a place where ‘Nothing ever happens but the wallpaper’.
The kind of suburban boredom where DIY home-improvement stands in for entertainment. Surface is changed in an attempt to hide dull routine. Wallpaper covers cracks or aspires to hint at a particular lifestyle; by its very nature it is pretending. Temporary yet ubiquitous, wallpaper is surface, it is flimsy, it is superficial. Wallpaper that tries to be Sculpture is Surface trying to be Subject.
Deliberately ignoring the properties of their material, sculptures made of wallpaper stick their fingers in their ears and try to stand up anyway. Anti-monumental in choice, the materiality of paper fights against the desire to be self-supporting and independent and the object is destined to fail from the start. Divorcing its intended function, the material strives to be autonomous. Stained with Suburbia it will never be free from those associations. Wooden structures that reference stud walls or canvas stretchers mock the weak and useless paper forms. Smug and utilitarian the rigid structures loom over The Deflated, exaggerating their slump with their own solidity. These structures follow the rules and fulfil a function. They have an unarguable use-value and pity their paper companion whose only aspiration is to be more than decorative façade.
The rigidity of the structure is stubborn and unmoving; reliable and stifling. The Sagging, drooping paper objects are aspiring, slowly failing and stagnating. Domestic structure is stubborn, domestic surface is lying. This is Suburbia.
Dorothea Tanning describes her hometown as a place where ‘Nothing ever happens but the wallpaper’.
The kind of suburban boredom where DIY home-improvement stands in for entertainment. Surface is changed in an attempt to hide dull routine. Wallpaper covers cracks or aspires to hint at a particular lifestyle; by its very nature it is pretending. Temporary yet ubiquitous, wallpaper is surface, it is flimsy, it is superficial. Wallpaper that tries to be Sculpture is Surface trying to be Subject.
Deliberately ignoring the properties of their material, sculptures made of wallpaper stick their fingers in their ears and try to stand up anyway. Anti-monumental in choice, the materiality of paper fights against the desire to be self-supporting and independent and the object is destined to fail from the start. Divorcing its intended function, the material strives to be autonomous. Stained with Suburbia it will never be free from those associations. Wooden structures that reference stud walls or canvas stretchers mock the weak and useless paper forms. Smug and utilitarian the rigid structures loom over The Deflated, exaggerating their slump with their own solidity. These structures follow the rules and fulfil a function. They have an unarguable use-value and pity their paper companion whose only aspiration is to be more than decorative façade.
The rigidity of the structure is stubborn and unmoving; reliable and stifling. The Sagging, drooping paper objects are aspiring, slowly failing and stagnating. Domestic structure is stubborn, domestic surface is lying. This is Suburbia.