For four days in July, you can walk into a website. Inventory transforms Stanley Picker Gallery’s project space into an e-commerce store: visualizing the gallery as a brick-and-mortar retail space for pop-up launches. The show takes the logic of online shopping seriously, as the most pervasive language of transaction, desire, and technology-turned-tangible today.
The exhibition presents the different UI components of an e-commerce store, with Jesmonite garment casts and large-scale etchings. The casts function as product imagery, with optimized legibility and sterile, bodiless desire. The etchings operate as hyperlinks and aspirational campaigns: the explicit demarcation of online spaces, and their expansions into performed universes. Together they stage the hollow visual grammar of online shopping, presenting an inventory of things not meant to be touched, but only seen.
Underpinning the work is a longer history: print was the first technology of mass reproduction, the original infrastructure for circulating information and manufacturing desire. The work points to the screen as its monstrous successor: faster, potentially infinite, but inherently rigid. Working across intaglio and jesmonite casting to make this inheritance visible, the artist uses mass-reproducible techniques to create one-of-one ‘couture’.