TABERNACLE OF DISCARDED TREASURES
Secret Project Robot is pleased to present the Tabernacle of Discarded Treasures, an immersive site specific installation that explores the transformation of objects from worthless castaway to treasure, holy relic, fetish item, antiquity and, in this instance, work of art with a reimagined narrative.
For this show the artists Rachel Nelson and Erik Zajacekowski will build a series of artistic shrines. Each shrine will include paintings, sculptures, reliefs and impressions of our most ferverously tossed aside items, especially those which still embody utility i.e., electroncics, clothing, toys and furniture and their recent yet outdated advertisements. The installation will have a series of panels and be organized around a central fountain which will be composed of disposed objects made into a sculptural element, the windows/doors will be decorated with “stained glass” made from translucent packaging and the walls will have a series of one dimensional hand painted columns to create a sense of symetry . The space will be an effigy to consumption in a capitalist era and a celebration to the afterlife of things tossed aside being made precious again.
The installation will visually toy with the many facets of the discarded item: as an ideologically manifested phenomonemon of our innermost capitalist desire: to always consume more; as a mode of produciton of the wealthy in order to impoverish and endanger the poor, as psychological analogy as per our ability to discard cherished items i.e., to make things meaningless and banal, and finally the discarded item and our complicit role in our own impending demise as humans as per landfills, the destruction of nature, oceans and ultimately climate change.
In this installation the artists seek to transform the objectified and remind ourselves of the neccessity to see beyond what was “So hot last year” or at the “very height of fashion” and to find intrinsic meaning in what is before us as a means to quell the tyranny of our own desire.
