Garage Sale Season

Garage sales are always a peculiar form of display. Public and private spaces mingle, collections are unwittingly catalogued and assembled, and precious keepsakes made negotiable. Consumer goods are brought back full circle to a storefront of sorts, though they are devalued, worn, and unwanted. Garage sales offer liberation from accumulation to the vendor, and almost free consumption to the buyer. It is little wonder, then, that this format should provide so fruitful a space for artists and curators to build narratives about memory and value. For this realization we have to thank the fast & dirty Collective, the organizers and artists behind last weekend’s Garage Show.

Garage Show combined the works of Adriean Koleric, Robert Harpin and Emily Soder-Duncan in-between two garages. Rob and Adrien’s work seemed to happily interbreed in the first space, while Emily enter into a dialogue moreso with her garage a few doors down. As per fast & dirty’s ethos, this arrangement was temporary, rough around the edges, and far outside the hygienic habitus of the white cube gallery. The show was up for two days, during which hotdogs were tailgated, prices were haggled over, and strangers mingled in art critiques. There was an invigorating kind of excitement in the air; risks were taken and rewarded.

Adriean and Rob’s installation seems to have taken its inspiration from the air of desperation that sometimes accompanies garage sales. They constructed a darkly humorous narrative of a failed artist who, after being unable to sell his work at gallery prices is forced to hawk his wares to indifferent customers in his garage. There a few humorous nods to the great scandals of conceptual art, be it through the toilet hiding under a display table or a Damien Hirst-eque plastic skull half covered in glitter, tagged for the low low price of “$2.5 million- o.b.o.” The pricing scheme of the show continued this sense of failed mercantilism, enticing consumption not through the acquisition of material goods, but rather the thrill of a bargain. A formerly priceless work has been discounted to “$20- comes with a skateboard.” Likewise a $6000 fibre piece was knocked down to “$15- used by a real artist!” Surprising to some, these bargain bin prices were the actual going rates for the work. The artists performed their roles well, haggling with bartering visitors and caught in-between making the case for the bruised monetary worth of their art and the desire to rid their studios of clutter. Even the ready-mades are modest: toys bought from Value Village for a dollar and marked up to a dollar and fifty cents.

These interactions made for a very interesting examination of how conceptual art relies on legitimating structures to maintain its value, materially or otherwise. Readymades and appropriations were placed in uncomfortable proximity to the banal context from which they came, creating an anxiety which is reflected in the deflated pricing. An artist without a gallery is an artist stripped bare of pretence, which didn’t bode well for the mass-culture reliant character Rob and Adriean constructed. This self-doubt and frustration may well be part biographical- sentiments that many of us artists share and which fast & dirty in part seeks to alleviate. I found myself rooting for this artist character, hoping that he’d sell enough junk and make enough cash to get a fresh lease on art. Not that the artworks Adriean and Rob sold were junk- there were plenty of curious and well-crafted pieces selling in what might be the steal of the year.

Emily Soder-Duncan, conversely, approached the garage as a site of archiving rather than bare-knuckle commerce. Her installation eschewed price tags for museum labels detailing the collections sourced in her display of art, antiques, and the sort of nostalgic detritus that we might find in our parents’ garages. While Rob and Adriean’s installation exposed the fragility of bringing art back to its source material, Emily’s work is instead strengthened by this proximity. The interwoven references between art and objects reveals connections across generations and sites, while the intimate space of her garage immediately greets the nose with a comfortable mustiness. Suggesting an older form of the museum, of archives formed through curiosity and memory rather than taxonomy, the installation became a charged site of discovery and disparate recollections.

There was an intentional ambiguity to the origin and art status of many of the objects left in the garage. While bygone antiques such as a croquette set, wooden chest, and horse shoe were labelled as belonging either to the artist’s mother or garage’s owner, other objects tucked away in corners went unannounced. As one became more immersed in the relational history of the display, this categorical imperative to separate art from non-art became less and less important. An appropriated shingle guide, minimally adorned, hung across from a pile of old wooden singles produced from its form by the artist’s grandfather. Both objects, in the haze of nostalgia, seemed to demand equal standing and recognition. Parchment paper browned with the outline of pretzels joined another wooden assemblage, imbuing it with a more intimate kind of value. Scraps of envelopes, old cigarette cards, and crumpled cardstock came together in collages that recall the sentimental accumulation of mementos, of memory made vulnerable and material. These mixed media materials were then deconstructed in a corner shelf containing an inventory of ephemera, preserved in jam jars and lit with a warm glow. Though objectively worthless, the artists and curators skillfully convince us to imbue these objects with a value that stems from our shared familiar associations and half-forgotten childhoods. This kind of set up makes the viewer acutely aware of their own embodiment and role to play in bringing worth to the art object.

While Garage Show is remarkable for the quality of these installations alone, it further provoked an intriguing play of public space and community. The garages were two doors down from one another, effectively appropriating part of the alley into its wider art project. A furniture scrapheap beached on a driveway became much admired for its sculptural potential, while a half completed bit of masonry struck many visitors as a perfect Carl Andre. Normal residents working on projects in their garages became a subject of new curiosity, with the immediate expectation that art would be found inside. The distinction between public and private space was blurred, and art was realized into life within the immediate radius of the installations.

The one parting thought I was left with when leaving the show on Sunday was the acute desire to host my own garage show or closet show or just generally explore the potential of space and all its radical possibilities. fast & dirty, along with The Apartment Show and The Office Show are manifestations of a new-found tenacity in the Edmonton art scene to make our own opportunities rather than waiting for shows to come our way. What is emerging in this investigation of possibilities is the sense that not only is DIY exhibition practice possible, it opens up the potential for some incredibly cogent examinations of otherwise ordinary spaces. I wait eagerly to see what we’ll come up with next.