'PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE'- JULIA VARELA, NURIA FUSTER AND WILLIAM MACKRELL

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

The RYDER
19a Herald Street
London E2 6JT
OPENING  HOURS:   Wed – Sat , 12 -6pm

19 de Julio  al 20 de Agosto 2016

19th of July to 20th of Agosto 2016

Inaguración/ Opening: 

19 de Julio 2016 a las 19:00 h.

19th of July 2016 at 19:00 pm

NURIA FUSTER

JULIA VARELA

WILLIAM  MACKRELL

Planned Obsolescence reflects on the afterlife of consumed objects, desire and the material world.  A project realised in collaboration with at Ryder Projects and curated by SCAN (Spanish Contemporary Art Network), the exhibition is the first of a series presented in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Guy Debord’s prescient The Society of the Spectacle. 

Can ‘fetish-ness’ be dislodged from an object through violent intervention? 

Planned Obsolescence examines the persistence of material autonomy and poses questions about the meanings of designed redundancy and recycling in a culture that is consumed and mediated through devices which also have expiry dates.

Planned Obsolescence is presented as a visual conversation among three artists, Nuria Fuster, Julia Varela and William Mackrell, interrogating the materiality and mechanisms of the fetish aura in which projection (psychic and actual), excess and failure are strategic tools. 

Nuria Fuster (b. 1978, Spain) teases anthropomorphic of items of clothing, a bicycle helmet, an inflatable mattress. A galvanised rod, like an element of exercise equipment or a neighbour’s basement fetish dungeon kit sits high on a wall, trailing silvery chain looped to a rafter, suggesting ritualised and repetitive bodies.  Fuster enacts violent interventions on the bodies of these goods – flames, lashings, breakage. The inflatable mattress littered with geometric reflective shards suggests the immediacy of violence, of puncture, even as it reflects us, the viewers onto its puffed up body and a hand pump invites our hand to intervene.

Julia Varela (b. 1986, Spain) here deploys damage as an investigative tool, melting and bending flat screen televisions into bat-like origami on the gallery floor. The glossy, lifeless screens defiantly reflecting the gallery and ourselves on their folded surfaces. The device becomes material; an attempted sublimation of the consumer good. On the gallery wall a pick-axe-like form is rendered in a linear fluorescent tube. Both beautiful and threatening, it is also fragile, precarious – its handle weak, glowing, breakable.  Both pieces flicker, hovering between the memory of their constituent elements and the possibility of their new bodies.

William Mackrell (b.1983, United Kingdom) uses strategies of repetition and accumulation to investigate failure, rupture and time. In Three Points of View we witness the interminable flickering of a fluorescent bulb projected into a corner that suggests both the kinetic pulse of the discotheque and also acts as a kind of technological memento mori.