Tiger Economy by Ludovica Gioscia

About

The installation Tiger Economy highlights another new element in Gioscia's work. Child-scale three dimensional installations made from flat-pack screens and wooden shapes mimick the artifice and iconoclasm of gambling and leisure cities, such as Vegas but also Macao and Dubai. Wooden screens are filled with silks from Thailand and Hongkong, cut-out shapes hold wallpapers featuring decorative patterns made from quotations of Liechtenstein, Picasso, Fontana. With their videoarcade type piracy the screens populate a large irregular platform, which in turn represents a comicstrip type popart shape. The work is lightweight, theatrical, camp, irreverent and no longer post-modern. Or post-modernism's worst nightmare- it is the simulacrum and it works just fine. Despite knowing that it is no more stable than Westworld I want to believe in it, stroke it, embrace it. I too covet Babylon, Atlantis and all that glitters. So does Gioscia and we both and the audience will know that all that glitters is not gold. This is one shiny exhibition to have unashamed fun in, and that is the very moment that we also understand the critique, which is hidden under all that glitz. The great thing about art is that it still works even when consumer culture has just died.