Start By Discarding

Installation, 2016 — LAMOA at Occidental College

Our growth and consumption-driven economy produces an enormous amount of stuff that becomes obsolete in a very short amount of time and then is thrown out, making room for ever the new. Often these rejects can be found discarded on the sidewalks near people's homes in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Gabrielle Jennings photographed these abandoned things and has silhouetted them with various shades of green, referencing the video practice of chroma-keying. This is the process of isolating a single color in an electronic image and using software to make that area transparent, allowing another image to show through the affected areas.

Accentuating the idea of absence and presence, Jennings uses the sliding doors of LAMOA to display before and after images of each discarded object printed as a series of 12 posters. Literature related to the subject matter of the exhibition – the discarded detritus of contemporary life, our culture’s obsession with stuff, and the self-help, organizational trends that promise to transform our lives – are strewn across the floor of the space and available for the taking. Marie Kondo’s wildly bestselling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is among them. Additionally, triangular shade sails painted in various shades of DIY green screen paint and attached to the building structure intersect the space and re-present the silhouetted shapes as places of psychic projection.

Links:

http://losangelesmuseumofart.blogspot.com/2016/10/gabrielle-jennings-start-by-discarding.html
http://contemporaryartreview.la/support-structures/

(Text courtesy of Los Angeles Museum of Art, photos courtesy of Alice Könitz and Rachel Bank)