eilis mcdonald
Force-Quit/BRB/Quater Life Crisis Modern Wall Clock, Force-Quit mini button 10 pack, & Seamless Tile Coasters
(selected works for "Forms of Melancholy" group show at Sego Art Center, Utah)
Curated by C. Coy
2008-09

"Cafe Press, when viewed as a tool for artistic production is an interesting departure point for the exploration of object creation 'after the internet'. Both the site and it's user community celebrate the ease and immediacy of invisibly manufactured, ready-to-make items. Their contributions make for a staggering array of proposed t-shirts, teddybears and campaign signs all made in narrowly prescribed forms. As Nicolas Bourriaud writes in his exploration of relational aesthetics, "the advances of technology and 'Reason'... blindly replace human labour by machines, and set up more and more sophisticated subjugation techniques... So the modern emancipation plan has been substituted by countless forms of melancholy." This installation at Sego Art space aims to address forms of melancholy found on cafepress and allow the invited artists an opportunity to designate works for manufacture and purchase on the site and in the space."
-- C. Coy, Forms of Melancholy press release, 2009

Review