Artists: Firelei Baez, Oasa Duverney, Yeji Jun, James Tunick, Jeremy Willis
This is a world obsessed with objects. Their materiality drives our consumer culture, in many ways shaping our contemporary identity. Our interest in the object moves beyond its obvious physicality, and forces itself upon the non-material, even the ephemeral. Objectification is a way to simplify the world and its complex issues: issues of race, gender, body image, sexuality, and philosophy. By reducing complex ideas down to a single notion, they become easier to absorb and comprehend. This show explores the ways in which artists use the object to navigate intangible ideas of identity, witling those elements down to their simplest forms.
In art, objectification is almost a necessity, for art deals with the language of objects. While in society we theoretically try to move away from objectification for moral reasons, in consumer culture (of which art is an integral part) we deal in the language of the object, and embrace its simplicity. Objectification has become the great unifier.
So now, rather than retreat, the culture of objectification has gone several steps further. Women now objectify men, which licenses men to further objectify women. People are reduced down to their racial or cultural heritage at a glance, and are thereby assigned to that heritage forever. With the rise of plastic surgery, people are turning their own bodies into objects, trading in noses and breasts as though they were shoes. How does this all play out in a culture that is perhaps more explicitly about the object than any other? The objectification of our lives, our feelings, our bodies, and our art is the way we navigate the world, from pop culture to personal relationships. It is a universal language, serving as a cultural currency, and producing physical signifiers to the intangible elements of our experience that are perhaps the most powerful. These artists reveal the interplay of the art object with objectification, emphasizing personal complexities through the simplicity of the object.
