Resurrection
Discarded Objects Gain New Life, Exhibited at Parisian Laundry
At what point do useful objects become unwanted?
This is a question that exhibition Grade, displayed at Parisian Laundry, asks its viewer to ponder.
Grade is a mixed media exhibit that plays with ideas of efficiency versus inefficiency and practicality versus impracticality.
Artist Adrienne Spier is a former Concordia fine arts student. She seeks to explore the artful usefulness of discarded and overlooked objects in her sculptures, photographs and installations.
The artist found every object used in her exhibit after they had already been discarded. Her works conjure up ideas of failure at the personal and global level of Western civilization—how perfectly useful objects or items which may be a little bit worn are mindlessly thrown away in the search for something better or more efficient.
Her works are exhibited alongside Jennifer Lefort’s collection of works, entitled Make-Believe. By showcasing Spier and Lefort’s work, Parisian Laundry is paying homage to November being Women’s History Month.
Parisian Laundry is an open concept gallery. The space has a warehouse feel and is enlivened by floor to ceiling windows, flooding it with light. The clean sparseness of the gallery provides a suitable landscape for Spier’s works.
“I am interested in how unwanted objects can be altered to take up space in new and meaningful ways,” she said.
Spier takes objects commonly seen in high schools (desks, wood flooring, parking lot barriers) and takes them out of their original context; framing, transforming and portraying them in new forms and perspectives.
The sculpture and installation pieces displayed take objects that we encounter every day but are hardly aware of. Spier displays these pieces so that the viewer can re-think what these objects mean.
One piece consists of concrete parking lot barriers embedded with blinking LED lights and adorned with handles made out of tire parts. Another displays an impressive stack of flawed hardwood flooring. This piece creates a hypnotic pattern that leads the viewer’s eye up to the ceiling and gives a perspective of the true excessiveness of these discarded materials. The vertical nature of the piece recalls the trees from which the wood originated.
Spier also showcases vivid, detail-oriented digital prints of dismantled school desks in “Inside Desks” series, complete with graffiti (varying from love notes and drawings to profanities) and a rainbow assortment of gum—almost like a time capsule of the students who used them.
In “Classroom,” a 61 × 74” digital print, she assembles flattened desk pieces that create a geometric pattern with a blackboard as the backdrop. The works are subtly imperfect, and demand to be closely observed.
We’re the generation of the upgrade, and Spier seeks to change our minds, or at least make us think about the value of perceived waste.
Grade will be displayed at Parisian Laundry (3550 St-Antoine St. W.) until Nov. 27. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 12—5 p.m.) Adrienne Spier will be holding an artist talk this Saturday Nov. 6 at 3 p.m.
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 12, published November 2, 2010.
