-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published at 5:11pm
Sign up today!
One end of the Green Lantern’s second-floor loft gallery has been colonized by other people’s stuff. Wine corks, rubber ducks, matchbooks and PEZ dispensers are props and players in a landscape composed of things common and peculiar, old and new, few and numerous. According to the exhibition’s press release, Chicago artist Shannon Stratton—who arranged these materials and is known for her good work as director of the nonprofit gallery ThreeWalls—is “coming to terms with her deep desire to arrange things for others.”
Brown paper bags cover the gallery’s windows, multicolored art-show cards blanket the walls, plastic gift cards carpet the floor in meticulous patterns and JFK busts mark the narrow pathway through this miniaturized acreage of personal collectibles. A (real) cat sits among thread spools and color paint chips, surveying viewers from behind the cork fence that defines the outer boundary of Stratton’s dense enclave. In the installation’s foreground, the collections are orderly, but they become bulky and unruly as they extend toward the windows, turning the gallery floor into mountainous terrain.
“Restless” collapses notions of value, confusing precious objects, antiques, samples, memorabilia and cast-offs. Its stuff is too eclectic for it to work as a formal sculpture: It’s neither the collection of a single individual nor the sundries of the entire consuming public. The installation’s reverence for both the discipline of collecting and the poetics of arranging prevents it from being a critique of consumer culture; instead, Stratton’s work is a force of both acquisitive materialism and beautiful materiality.
