un-sold | Stéphanie St-Jean Aubre

About

un-sold is a piece about one’s way to deal with her stuff – a coalescence of printmaking, performance, and installation by Stéphanie St-Jean Aubre. This is an infiltration of the commercial gallery on every level. We bring the artist’s studio directly into the gallery where she works on a regular schedule. As she works, the exhibition gradually reveals the most intimate aspects of an artist’s process: discipline, insecurity, the pressure to produce, to appeal, to sell. By placing this experimental, performative, and ephemeral exhibition into an explicitly commercial gallery, we intend to question the dominance and influence of commercial interests on an artist’s vision and creation.

Stéphanie St-Jean Aubre is not only creating new pieces, she is surrounded by work that remains with her, relics that outlive her past: is it a burden? In the novel face of consumerism, un-sold asks, what does the artist’s failure look like? Does it look like heaps of unfinished, un-sold works? Over the course of the exhibition, we constantly shift our attention between the artist at work (is it a mimicry?) and the commercial gallery’s reverence, and demand, for commodity – Art and Artist as Product.