New monograph: Josephine Meckseper's work exposes the paradoxes of consumer culture through the combination of mass-produced objects with images and artefacts of historical and political events.
For the last two decades, Josephine Meckseper's practice has interrogated politics, capitalism, and art history through the juxtapositions of images and objects. Drawn from the visual and material cultures of protest and political activism, advertising, cinema, and early twentieth-century display architecture, Meckseper's works are visually confrontational yet subtle, relying on strategies of infiltration rather than explicit positions. Central to the body of work featured in 10 minutes after is an investigation of the object as a form of “analogue recording device,” in which found materials document temporal environments or situations. Wall vitrines, shelves, denim assemblages, and abstract sculptures composed of industrial display racks become repositories of social, cultural, political, and economic significance. The window frame becomes a vehicle to convey a perspective of the world inside and outside the studio. Accumulated objects and ephemera, recycled studio materials, items salvaged from the street or obtained from now-extinct local stores are reconceived within a new series of window vitrines. The publication features installation views from Meckseper's recent exhibition at Timothy Taylor, a gallery of “psychoimages,” and two newly commissioned texts. Independent curator and writer Piper Marshall considers ideas of détournement, the readymade, and base materialism in Meckseper's oeuvre, while writer and editor Domenick Ammirati explores the significance of painting and text within Meckseper's installations.
Published following the artist exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery from October 12 to December 12, 2015.
In her photography, videos, and installations Josephine Meckseper
(born Lilienthal, 1964, lives and works in New York) engages with the
interaction between politics and glamour. Thus, in her works, images of
political activism—whether photographs of demonstrations or
newspaper cuttings—are set against sparkling consumer goods and
advertising motifs, evoking a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, the
pop-political vocabulary of forms appears absurd in its opposing
ideological effect; on the other, the artist discloses references by
interpolating them seamlessly in a decorative and apparently elegant
display. Meckseper has pursued the capitalist-critique approach of
recent years, with subject areas agitating around the war in Iraq and the
oil industry, with all their inherent economic and socio-political
implications, in particular those concerning the automobile industry.
