HEATHER PHILIPSON: FINAL DAYS
OPENING RECEPTION: Tuesday, November 3 , 6-8 PM
Artist-poet Heather Phillipson’s FINAL DAYS deconstructs the real-life retail environment, imagining the modern department store as a stagnant and obsolete landscape in the wake of the click-to-buy convenience of online shopping.
Structured episodically, FINAL DAYS presents an installation of six video-poems across clustered monitors that function as sequential departments, mimicking the ordering and sectioning of a typical department store: Bedroom, Underwear, Towels & Textiles, Hosiery, Office, and Special Offers. Each section and text suggests the social, personal and intimate scenarios that inform our relationships as consumers within retail markets, behaviors that are presently in flux due to the essentially social interaction free activity of online shopping. Phillipson brings together screens, audio bleeds, and material conglomerations that resemble packaging, stacking, and merchandise to combine the technological bombardment of a televisual retail arena within the unboxed promise of an online warehouse.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Heather Phillipson (b. 1978, London, England) creates multi-sensory environments through layers of sculpture, video, text, and live voiceovers, weaving her audience through ideas and narratives that splinter and evolve in their unfolding.
Both an artist and a published poet, Phillipson’s work has been exhibited widely, at institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); Tate Britain, London (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2014); and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2012) among many others.
CREDITS: HEATHER PHILLIPSON, FINAL DAYS, CO-PRESENTED WITH PERFORMA 2015. PHOTOS BY PAULA COURT, COURTESY OF PERFORMA.
ABOUT PERFORMA
Founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, Performa is the leading organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Since launching New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, the organization has solidified its identity as a commissioning and producing entity. As a “museum without walls,” Performa provides important art historical heft to the field by showing the development of live art in all its forms from many different cultural perspectives reaching back to the Renaissance. The Performa Biennial is celebrated world wide as the first biennial to give specialized attention to this remarkable history, transforming the city of New York into the ‘world capital of artists’ performance’ every other November. Performa attracts a national and international audience of more than 200,000 and receives more than 5,000,000 website hits during its three week run. In the last decade Performa has presented 592 performances, worked with 732 artists, and toured commissioned performances in 17 countries around the world.