Your Cart is Empty, Latex Paint on Wall, 30" x 24"
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Solo Show @ Flynndog Gallery, Burlington, VT.
September 10th - October 31st, 2021
RE-E-VALU-ATE, 2021. Acrylic, Graphite, and Hardware on Plywood. 18" x 42"
Seven Days Review by Pamela Polston & Featured in The 2021 Art Shows We Liked Best, and Why
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By Kevin Donegan
Touching on themes of consumption, inequality, and waste, this show explores diverse aspects of our consumer-driven culture, and my role within it. Through the lens of shopping carts, trash containers, and other urban detritus, I examine my relationship to material, to the earth, and to our collective values. I invite you to join me.
All of the shopping carts (and cart components) included in this exhibition were found abandoned around Burlington in various states of dysfunction and disrepair. I was drawn to them initially as beautiful objects but grew to appreciate them as metaphors for something more. Simultaneously representing excess and scarcity, indulgence and desperation, homelessness and home-more-ness, these carts became proxies for my own inner conflicts, questions, and elusive aspirations.
I began incorporating trash containers and currency into the work as it evolved over time: trash containers as an illogical end point to the consumption equation, and currency as the flawed means by which we tend to assign value. But the more I delved into the specificity of these subjects, the more they branched and expanded, such that the exhibition as a whole can be seen as a glimpse into an ongoing process; imperfect and incomplete.
All of the shopping carts (and cart components) included in this exhibition were found abandoned around Burlington in various states of dysfunction and disrepair. I was drawn to them initially as beautiful objects but grew to appreciate them as metaphors for something more. Simultaneously representing excess and scarcity, indulgence and desperation, homelessness and home-more-ness, these carts became proxies for my own inner conflicts, questions, and elusive aspirations.
I began incorporating trash containers and currency into the work as it evolved over time: trash containers as an illogical end point to the consumption equation, and currency as the flawed means by which we tend to assign value. But the more I delved into the specificity of these subjects, the more they branched and expanded, such that the exhibition as a whole can be seen as a glimpse into an ongoing process; imperfect and incomplete.
Trash Pedestal (Detail), 2021. Latex Paint on Plywood.
