Contemporary tales of excessive inutilities
Excessive – to go beyond the usual, necessary, or proper limit or degree. To have a certain urge ”to acquire material goods beyond one’s needs and often means.”
Excessivism, as a somehow new global art movement, tends to be a commentary on economic materialism. The movement draws our attention to a capitalist system where everything is about profits, or better yet, about minimal costs, which means that there is absolutely no consideration of aspects like people and the environment. While one part of our world wastes precious natural resources, the other suffers on the brink of survival, neglected and isolated, and evidence of such a situation inevitably appears daily. Experimenting with materials and techniques, excessivism uses notions of abstraction to express both the allure and absurdity of the money-driven lifestyle. Although strongly inspired by the concepts of excessivism, my work is figurative. Dealing with preconceived notions of utilitarian tools of everyday use also raises questions of orientation, examining what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time.
The freestanding totem-like sculpture resembles an oversized knife. While the knife handle is pretty true to what a knife handle looks like, the blade part is stylized and designed to look like plushies. In Queer phenomenology, a book that inspires me a lot, the writer reveals how social relations spatially arrange, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that seem distant at first glance. Despite its association with escapism, visual humor frequently serves as an effective method of social criticism as well. It is amazing how quickly we can get caught off guard by a joke, and it can literally leave us speechless. And in that moment of laughter, we often experience a shift in attitude or understanding. A sense of humor creates a new sense of consciousness that has the power to change the way we perceive the world, at the very least.
