The new exhibit in the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum’s (EAGM) Gallery No. 2 is a drawing and photo-based exhibit that explores people’s emotional relationships with personal belongings.
Karla Griffin’s It’s not you, it’s Me will be on display from Feb. 1 to March 29. Griffin, who is based in Saskatoon, looks at discarded and worn mass-produced items that no longer possess that brand new appearance.
The exhibit also explores the ways in which people assess and allocate worth in order to achieve subjective, personally significant relationships with their consumer goods.
“Through personification, these sad, discarded objects draw parallels to the dynamics associated with relationships of romantic love: a relationship that starts out new, exciting and fun, and slowly becomes ordinary, like an old couch whose springs are starting to give out, and is traded for a newer model, something better than before,” says the artist statement for Griffin’s exhibit.
Citing cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, Griffin’s statement says objects function as mirrors that provide us with desired images rather than real ones.
“What lies at the root of this work is a humourous look at the aftermath of breaking up with our material goods, such as a rejected lover coming to terms with the reality of a broken heart, cutting out the face of an ex-partner from a photograph, and being left with the task of discarding someone else’s personal objects,” Griffin said.
It’s not the perspective of the rejected love that is being examined in Griffin’s exhibit, rater the perspective of the discarded objects.
Her other work explores issues of consumption, commodification and identity formation through both photography and drawing.
Griffin was not able to attend an opening reception for the exhibit on Feb. 1 at the EAGM.
Amber Andersen, the curator/director of the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum, believes Griffin’s exhibit fits in nicely with Diana Chisholm’s Delete if not Aloud, which offers a look at the items found through garage sale sites on social media.
(For more on Chisholm’s exhibit, please visit www.estevanmercury.ca).
