The Entire Exhibition Will Be Worn
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Mads Lynnerup: The Entire Exhibition Will Be Worn — the artist's second solo show with the gallery, comprising recent sculptures, silkscreen prints, and videos. Working across media, Lynnerup makes humorous and poignant works from close observation of his immediate environment, drawing attention to situations that might otherwise be overlooked in the day-to-day.
Many of the works respond to the recession and financial crisis. The silkscreen slogans Now Firing, It's a Sign, and Build More Luxury Condoms turn the viewer toward economic woes while reflecting on how similar words can carry opposite meanings — "hiring" and "firing." In the video Untitled (Everything Has a Price), Lynnerup walks through his neighborhood with the camera trained on a grocery pricing gun, tagging the objects he passes: an abandoned mattress, a tipped-over plant, a discarded television.
Mads Lynnerup lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Take a Day for Yourself began during a residency at EMPAC in Troy, New York, where Lynnerup invited members of the local community to let him film them as they each took a day off. Preparing the project, he was struck by how unfamiliar the very idea of a day off had become to many people — and, amid the global recession, how timely defending it suddenly felt.
The result is a three-channel video and a suite of drawings documenting each participant's day. The eight triptychs follow a nurse, a marketing director, an independent bookstore manager, a retired politician and community activist, a husband-and-wife design team, a clerk, an arborist and choreographer, and a restaurant owner through their respective adventures.
