Out of Use

APT artists group Superflex's "Investment Bank Flowerpots" are 3D printed models of the corporate head quarter buildings operated by twenty of the world's largest investment banks. Each model serves as flower pots for hallucinogenic plants. The largest twenty banks include GoldmanSachs, Deutsche Bank, CitiGroup and JPMorgan Chase. The plants growing from the models are peyote and san pedro cacti containing. mescaline as well as marijuana plants.The combination of bank and plant forms the title of each work, for example, Investment Bank Flowerpots/ Deutsche Bank Marijuana.

Two of the Investment Bank Flowerpot series will be on display in the group show Out of Use at Gallery Susanne Ottesen.

"Out of use" sets out to survey art relating to interior design and the meeting between furniture, sculpture and the body. The works in the show are involved in functionality and loss of function through recycling, misuse, and transformation of everyday objects like chairs, potted plants, mirrors, beds, and blinds.

Interior design is usually associated with the private sphere and a non-public social space. Yet in several works in the show décor elements are reconstructed so that the domestic and public sphere, or singularity and design, are mixed together. The works relate to a cultural situation where everything increasingly exist as design in multiple versions, from corkscrews to sofas, and where sign value tends to overshadow use value.

Furniture is - possibly to a larger degree than other types of objects - open to an anthropomorphic reading. This means that it is relatively easy to experience them as mirrors of one's own self. In ordinary language this is hinted at when we speak of for example the legs of a table or the arms of a chair. A lamp is always also a kind of subject, a chair is a consciousness, at least this is how we often perceive it. They are things we live with and literally live in, and they are things that often live on after us in order to be integrated in other contexts.

Arguably the white cube is historically prefigured in the collectors' house screened off from its surroundings. In this sense the interior is mirrored in the white cube. On the other hand the works undermine this sense of a delimited space through their furniture-like links to everyday life and bodily use. When interior design and exhibition space are made to overlap the works drift into a scenic or stage-like atmosphere, reinforcing a sense of them as props. It reminds of how interior design is

Artists:

Bjørn Nørgaard, Emil Westman Hertz, Finn Reinbothe, FOS, Fredrik Tydén, Ib Braase, Jean Marc Routhier, Jørgen Carlo Larsen, Kasper Hesselbjerg, Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Marie Søndergaard Lolk, Martin Erik Andersen, Nanna Abell, Pind, Rasmus Høj Mygind, Superflex