Perrotin gallery is pleased to announce Another Man's Treasure, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Genesis Belanger, marking her first show in Asia.
The exhibition's title derives from a well-known English language idiom: 'one man's trash is another man's treasure.' With this conceit at its heart, Belanger injects a cunning irony into her pop-infused sculptures. The artist brings together amalgams of common objects, rendered with exaggerated forms, into a quiet dialogue with each other that speak volumes about our current cultural state.
Upon entering the exhibition, a scene unfolds composed of several vignettes that pull inspiration from urban life: street bazaars, an abandoned flower kiosk, garbage awaiting collection. In the second room, a solitary desk alludes to an office going-away party. Through creating these series of tableaux, the artist has delineated spaces that reveal a sense of psychic commune between each individual object.
Belanger takes the sidewalk rug (drained of colour) and lays out symbolist sculptures for any treasure seeker to find: a wrench with a tooth in its clasp, a hair curler passing through a donut, and a shirt with a sandwich in its front pocket. Once precious objects, they appear to have been left behind by their former owners. Sprawled out past lives are now awaiting the opportunity to be reborn into new narratives or discarded forever. Belanger urges us to explore this decisive moment, of trash or treasure, and consequently the perception between the experiences that make us richer versus the experiences that diminish us.
In another vignette nearby, a combination of potted plants and floral bouquets recall street-side flower kiosks, where blooms wait patiently for their suitors. Belanger has recently developed a more standard floral form—an identikit lego-like flower that suggests an ability to choose flora to suit any moment. While these are at the height of their fecundity, these too—she suggests—will fall out of favour. In another tableaux, amongst stuffed trash bags and junk food, lies When Dad Does the Shopping, a slumped 'paper' bag containing the spoils of a grocery trip. Dad's attempt to provide arouses a lick of suspicion: Are those lilting flowers an apology? Is the cigar a macho symbol of celebration? And is that jug of milk a lame attempt at providing sustenance? Another examination of masculinity can also be seen in Masculine Still Life: Past Your Prime, where clichés of male virility reach the reality of thickening torsos and waning potency. Is a popped cork a moment to celebrate, or another reason to self-medicate? In light of the exhibition's idiomatic title, Another Man's Treasure consistently asks the viewer similar questions.
Within each of these tableaux, Belanger has crafted objects that function as pedestals (both physical and conceptual), acting as connective devices for the work on display. These liminal framing objects—boxes, trash bags, drop cloths—create a narrative device that frames groupings of Belanger's work and underscores broader themes recurrent in the artist's oeuvre. Here Belanger crafts them from deceptively luxurious materials that mimic their vernacular real-world counterparts. Belanger shows empathy for the discarded, the deplorable, and the unwanted.
A sense of melancholy pervades the work throughout the exhibition, thanks to Belanger's wan palette, her subtle anthropomorphism, and her fondness for subjects both obsolete and undesired. Discarded junk food, broken electronics, useless tchotchkes, isolated body parts, and abandoned flowers lie neatly arranged as if waiting—perhaps hopelessly—for another lease on life. Are these really one man's treasure, or just a symptom of our collective consumptive malady?
Genesis Belanger's (born in 1978, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) work is characterized by the treatment of objects as surrogates for the body. Sculpted in stoneware, and working with a wide range of material, Belanger's work most often takes on human features, made uncomfortably familiar as they begin to resemble us. The artist's psychologically charged imagery ultimately points to society's progressive, yet stagnant, movement in gender stereotypes and equality as well as critiques mass consumerism.
In 2021, Belanger is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Consortium in Dijon, France. In 2020, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut dedicated a solo exhibition to her work and published a catalogue on the occasion. In 2019, Belanger created an installation in the New Museum's Storefront Window, New York.
Press release courtesy Perrotin.
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