We enter the shopping mall through large glass doors, which open onto the experience of North American modernity: immensity, abundance, desire. Our journey’s just begun, and we’re already lost in this showcase of hyper-availability. The primary goal is to play the consumer: anything can be ours, everything has potential. We throw ourselves into our role: the stores become our set, the signs transform into a script, the indoor promenade is now our stage. Power shifts quickly as we make transactions; we gradually become merchandise, available for all to see.
Milk Can Escape seeks to depict this cheap plastic world while addressing the politics of the gaze that continually challenges the dynamics between audience, performer, and mise en scène. Combining video and sculpture, Olga Abeleva’s exhibition traces the outlines of a structure of unfulfilled desire, observing shifts in power and the erosion of meaning in the constant flow of consumer goods.
A series of sculptures made of found materials rises like the topography of an imaginary city. Evoking both melodramatic scenographies and architectures of consumerism, each work contains a broken dream, a delusion, a projection, a sacrifice. Laden with references to different means of production – such as the theatre, the artist’s studio, and cave frescoes – these shoeboxes contain various aspirations and fantasies.
Documenting a play filmed in the artist’s studio, Fountain features Chris and Lucy, stuck in a mall and chaperoned by Mannequin, an enigmatic figure oscillating between janitor and director. Column, a towering set piece made from makeup samples, underscores the precariousness of the endless pursuit of glory, which Hollywood blindly promises us. Through the exploration of this place frozen in time, layers of interpersonal tension emerge through fatigue and disorientation, gradually giving way to a disintegration of language.
In a contagious slippage of identities through which reality slowly dissolves, the performers navigate the constraints of their respective roles. Between still and moving image, the film bridges fiction and documentary, persisting as a performative archive. When the curtain finally opens, abandoning scenographic conventions, it dissolves the line between performers and the crowd; a new audience emerges in this new exterior space, forcing the original spectators to take on the role of chorus.
Fountain is one of five plays included in Dimestore Diamond, a publication produced in parallel with the exhibition. These stories, like the exhibition, are rooted in the sense of confinement experienced by the characters who sense the boundaries of their reality, confined to a fictional shopping mall filled with dimestore diamonds, pleather stilettos, cheap costumes, B movies, and Splenda-sweetened cakes.
The exhibition’s title refers to a famous act by the illusionist Harry Houdini, who built a career around trickery and spectacle, orchestrating extravagant numbers featuring captivity that climaxed with a breathtaking escape. Milk Can Escape thus evokes a time when secrecy fueled the fascination of a public eager for suspense. Here, the word “can” could either be a noun or an active verb, thereby creating a statement, or even a warning: the character of Milk is able to flee, whereas Chris and Lucy are deprived of this luxury, trapped in an endless drift within an air-conditioned labyrinth. The two protagonists mirror our relationship to the world: they are stuck in a simulacrum, which they accept with striking ease. The simulacrum may not promise authenticity, but it offers an illusion whose intensity is even more potent.
— Joséphine Rivard, curator (trans. Käthe Roth)