COVET

About

COVET is a group exhibition that explores the rhetoric of display and the various systems, structures, and methods of presentation that have been employed within consumer frameworks. By scrutinizing the application these display objects have within consumer culture, the exhibition explores the role that display plays in maintaining a desirability of the things around us. This exhibition brings together nine artists whose work disentangles the object from its framing device. When the mechanisms and techniques for staging the object are fore-grounded, the display object itself gets pushed to the background becoming secondary, obsolete and invisible. Its purpose is to generate desirability for other things, never for itself. By taking away or confiscating the objects of display, COVET concentrates instead on specific structural devices full of empty and unfulfilled promises. Through various media, including mass-produced goods, manufactured items, photography, video, installation and sculpture the works in COVET delves into our cultural investment in material goods. By focusing on the staging and restaging of the display apparatus, there is a new emphasis upon their entropic deficiencies and inherent failure to satisfy. This is an exhibition about exhibiting the void, the unsatisfied and the aesthetics of display. COVET purports to open up a critique on the rhetoric of display that surrounds us and to stage a moment of collapse, failure and sublimated desire for the architectonics of consumer cultures. Curated by Suzanne Mooney