September 22–October 28, 2017
Proyectos Monclova
Colima 55, Col. Roma Norte
06700 Mexico City
Proyectos Monclova is pleased to present Josephine Meckseper’s first show with the gallery, and first solo exhibition in Mexico City.
With a dual focus on protest and the culture of consumer capitalism, Meckseper’s work exposes the instability of commodity value and aesthetic desire. Using methods of retail display such as glass vitrines, shelves, shop windows, and mirrors combined with a methodical and confrontational use of reflection, her work establishes a non-linear narrative that highlights capitalism’s infinite capacity to appropriate, replicate, and corrupt.
In vitrine-like sculptures, Meckseper assembles objects disparate as a photo of Sharon Stone, references to Brancusi’s endless column, a costume ring on a mannequin hand, and a painting that says simply AUSSTELLUNG [EXHIBITION], using détournement tactics to collapse exhibition and retail visual language. The sculptural works are flanked on one side by a series of paintings. In casually brushy strokes made with toilet wands they elude to mid-century master works, but here the painter’s canvas has been swapped out for the protester’s denim. The arrangement of retail display, consumer goods, modernist iconography and protestor’s garments allows Meckseper to question an object’s value through illogical juxtaposition, and proves how meaning or intent is subject to time, place, and economy.
Finally, DDYANLALSATSY is a supercut of footage from the 1980′s American culture touchstone television shows Dynasty and Dallas. Featuring campy scenes of exploding oil rigs, diamond necklaces, sweeping vistas of Texan cattle ranches, spontaneously ejaculating champagne bottles, and protesters brandishing signs behind a chain-link fence that say “Americans GO HOME!,” these soft-focus media fantasies of war and affluence resonate now as self-fulfilling prophesies. Set to a Detroit acid house dance track and reflected in a mirror floor sculpture, it’s the United States id with a sleeve of credit cards run amok.
