2020 As Long as I’ve Got My Health, and My Millions of Dollars, and My Gold House and Rocket Car, I Don’t Need Anything Else
2020.
Theme - In Excess
Full press release here.
The theme of this year’s fair was “In Excess”.
The title is one of my favorite quotes from The Simpsons. In this particular episode, a homeless man becomes rich overnight from a copyright lawsuit and is later found sitting outside his solid gold house in a tuxedo ironically panhandling on the curb.
As I get older, I realize there’s really no such thing as growing up. It sounds cliché, but staying true to the dreams of my childhood has only propelled me to connect with others more easily. There’s this demand for childhood nostalgia in adulthood more prevalent today than ever. A good exmaple of this is high end luxury brands and cartoon characters.
Material goods obtained give us the illusion of ‘leveling-up’ in the “video game of life”, but people never really change.
“Super Like” is the first piece you see before entering the gold room. A bed in the shape of an exaggerated Formula-1 vehicle, it acts as a symbol of overcompensation to the point where it can’t possibly work. Bigger rims, bigger tires, double wing... like a stripper with too much work done. In the sleeping area, it is filled with 500 plush smartphones wiht my Tinder profile – this is me at my most vulnerable. Alone in bed looking for love swipe after swipe.
Upon entering the gold room, the vases are sitting in the back. Appearing like a symbol of hope. Shoes are vessels that take us from A to B. As children I was sold that every new sneaker would make me faster and stronger. There becomes this desire to become better paralleling to the desire to obtain this material good. No matter how expensive the sneaker, we don’t all become pro athletes. Actually, quite the opposite. We be come professionals at something else - it’s the foundation in which we grow from - the spark of inspiration. The flower or plant is the outcome.
The arcade features a series of vinyettes of dream jobs I wanted as a child: rockstar, rapper & athlete. Building stop motion puppets is where my whole journey with woodworking began. I love the aesthetic of stop motion because it appears as if it’s mimicing and amature - very childlike and pure. Surrounded in the gold room are the characters that are in the stop motion video.
Photos 1-3 taken by Sammy Sachs.
Photos 4-8 taken by Justin Ryan Kim.