"Pre-Fab/Post-Fab: Art in a Readymade Era" both celebrates and critiques modern consumer culture

VISUAL ART PREVIEW

Artist Bailey Scieszka as her Old Put character. Photo by Nicholas Calcott.

Artist Bailey Scieszka as her Old Put character. Photo by Nicholas Calcott.

In some eras, artists were inspired by new techniques or materials. Now, it's mass consumption -- and we're not talking tuberculosis.

In the new U-M Institute for the Humanities exhibition Pre-Fab/Post-Fab: Art in a Readymade Era, three Detroit-based artists showcase works that speak to them growing up "with the influences of mass consumption, internet shopping, the glut of plastic toys, baubles, and tchotchkes."

Heidi Barlow, Shaina Kasztelan, Bailey Scieszka take these everyday objects and twist them into new forms to comment on pop culture, gender, and politics. 

From the press release:

A collage of works featured in the Pre-Fab/Post-Fab exhibition

"Barlow’s confection-like constructs are unsettling, much like an empty float or matted-hair Barbie in a backyard pool. Although enticing, they allude to something lost in the translation, some sweetness, or idealism gone missing, along with what once mattered.

"Shaina Kasztelan offers us psychedelic Middle America. Her assemblages are disorienting, vertigo-inducing. Technicolor sculptures conjure up hallucinations of the mall, or spinning carnival rides that last too long. 

"Bailey Scieszka takes this subversive garish ethos full tilt and invents her own world, literally morphing into her own creation. Scieszka’s alter-ego Old Put, a demonic shape-shifting clown, becomes the artist/protagonist and creates work in performance, video and drawing."

Pre-Fab/Post-Fab: Art in a Readymade Era opens with a reception at 6 pm on Thursday, Jan. 18. Scieskza will be performing as her Old Put character throughout the opening party.


"Pre-Fab/Post-Fab: Art in a Readymade Era" pop-up exhibition by Detroit-based artists Heidi Barlow, Shaina Kasztelan, Bailey Scieszka runs Jan. 18-31 at U-M's Institute for the Humanities Osterman Common Room 202 S. Thayer, Ann Arbor. The opening reception is Jan. 18, 6-8 pm. Visit lsa.umich.edu for more information.