Addison R.
Sara Yukiko, Alli Melanson, Isabella Kressin, Connor Bokovay & Tiziana Lamelia
Drawing inspiration from Liz Magor’s exhibition “I is being This” presented at Catriona Jeffreys in 2012, Addison R. delves into merchandising and how artists manipulate found images and objects to examine commercial narratives and the ideas commercial products conceal. Magor has called fashion trends “a powerful engine for reproducing and reinforcing specific aesthetic ideals”.
On her Instagram account, TikTok dancer-turned-pop star Addison Rae writes:
Addison: Help me❤️
To which the Pepsi account replies
Pepsi: you wrote? 💌🥤
Listening to a podcast recently, the creators described the pop star as a muse, without too much personality, making her an ideal vessel, for products and ideas to circulate. Her radiant smile cut through the flux chaos. In the podcast, they praise Rae’s brilliant adaptability. In this way, she is similar to capitalism, which, like a polymorphous, mutant beast, modulates its discourse to maximize its chances of survival, and embraces? trendy discourses, even those that criticize it. On Web 2.0, active participation, whether through the implosion of consumer and producer within the figure of the “prosumer” or through the personalization of products (e.g.: customizable shampoo) and consumed content (e.g. 4Upage), blurs the lines between commercial discourse and people. Fueled by parasocial link, personalities, their by-products, their stories, but also our interactions with them, are consumed and commercialized. Products talk like us.
In January 2024, conceptual artist Marina Abramović launched the secret of her longevity: a natural cream and drops developed with Dr. Nonna Brenner. Wait is this performance? Her website reads: “Our need for consumption allowed us to be consumed, and always keeps us hungry for new gadgets to buy. The result of all this is that we have lost our spiritual center.” signed “with love and gratitude, Marina”. Not bad. Like Marina’s longevity, we ourselves become products; we self-commodify.
This may explain a kind of empathy for our objects; they’re just like us. Magor has often said that she gives a voice to forgotten objects: she sets them free. This could be what happened to the piece of plastic belt and the Miu Miu box used by Connor Bokovay & Isabella Kressin to create their Dioramas. Or the brand Juicy Couture in Tiziana La Melia’s poem. One person’s trash is another’s treasure.
In a sense there is a relation between Magor’s found objects sculptures and the performance self on social media: both explore the tension between the real and the replicated, —whether object or identity—. In Baudrillard’s fashion simulacra supplant reality, creating a hyperreality, where digital personas, endlessly replicated and reshared, take on a life of their own.
A mise en abyme of the real. Like the body in Alli Melanson’s Ochema (After Michelangelo’s St Bartholomew), whose silhouette first appears printed on a Jean Paul Gauthier dress, then on this dupe, which, folded in half, reveals two new images, inside which an image of the artist is inserted. This duplication effect also occurs in Connor Bokovay’s diptych L’Air du Temps. In Sara Yukiko’s works, bodies have disappeared from clothing and cosmetics, leaving only traces.
Even the mundane sharing of an image from an Instagram carousel of a cute baby hippo to a loved one involves multiple layers. At the base of this cute image is the actual object, in this example, a real baby Hippo. Where is this Hippo? Does it even matter? You consume this Hippo, but is it consuming you in return? Is he trying to sell you a t-shirt with his face printed on it, a blush, a sumptuous nostalgic fragrance? Is it safe?
You upload a selfie with the hippo T-shirt you’ve just received: you’re a vessel embracing decadence, change, and uncertainty. It’s an admission, you’re part of a mutant economic system that turns the social bond into a commodity.
━ sophie