The Western Front

Artists:

Michael Campbell & Coby Ellison, Marc Horowitz, Shannon Spanhake, Marijke Jorritsma & The Art Dept at the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, Steve Lambert, Conrad Bakker, Center for Tactical Magic, Eva Strohmeier, Packard Jennings, The United Victorian Workers, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, plus new work by Vancouver artists (TBA)

Labels by:

Chris Cobb, Eric Zassenhaus, Emily Abendroth, Amar Ravva, Terri Cohn,Biz Stone, Jason Sanders, Stacy Doris, Jo Cook, Hilde Jaegtnes, Summi Kaipa, Jaime Cortez, Griffin McPartland, Ann Frost, Lisa Boyer, Melanie Ashworth, Lauren Shufran, Claire Kiefer, Eireene Nealand, Diana Aehegma, Hilary Kaplan, Tanesia Hale-Jones, Darren Riesz, Marc Nevin, Kathryn Webb, Brandon Broun

The Western Front Society is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle guest curated by Pond: Art, Activism, and Ideas. Shopdropping is an exhibition that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce (specifically, conglomerate retail stores). The artwork—ranging from social sculptures to gentle gestures of gift-leaving—is presented in the exhibition in the form of multiples/duplicates or audio/photo/video documentation. Using beauty, humor, and intimate address to invite shoppers’ self-reflection and second glance, the works eschew a reductivist commodity critique in favor of complex strategies that detourne situations, present alternatives to normative systems of exchange, and graft together alternate economic regimes.

Packard Jenning’s Il Duce Action Figure involves both the insertion of a hand-made Benito Mussolini doll into Wal-Mart and documentation of the ensuing comical conundrums (a spycam video of confused workers assigning a value to the item, the manual entry of ‘Mussolini’ onto the receipt, etc.). Steve Lambert’s ultra-genericized cereal boxes employ the language of advertising to create a meta-commodity. In Lost in the Supermarket, a collaboration by Marijke Jorritsma with youths from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, hand-crafted ceramic commodities (lotion, dishwashing soap, spice bottles, soup cans) were reverse-shoplifted into a local grocery conglomerate—a process that offers a delightfully humorous narrative of the encounter between shoppers/workers with these ‘inadequate’ or ‘fallible’ products made by kids.

Ultimately, Shopdropping expands the discourse and field of interventionist art, asking us to consider its nuanced range of representational strategy, intention, context, and references.