Modern Art Oxford is opening a major new site-specific installation by Debora Delmar Corp. Working with sculpture, video and installation, Debora Delmar Corp. explores the way in which our global consumer culture structures our very lives and routines. The artist creates intricate assemblages that appropriate familiar branded goods and imagery, reconfiguring it in an attempt to deconstruct the visual language of corporate advertising.
The exhibition Upward Mobility will include a group of banners emblazoned with aspirational imagery found on the social media page of a bank in Mexico. These works are fenced in by a series of kitchen countertops and garden hedges, creating a maze-like effect which the viewer will need to navigate to encounter a series of household appliances and objects from the artist’s native Mexico City. Through this immersive environment, Debora Delmar Corp. invites the viewer to consider the implicit messaging within the advertising imagery that surrounds us each day.
Debora Delmar Corp. is the name Débora Delmar, born 1986, Mexico City, a name that was adopted for the distribution of her artwork in 2009, while attending the School of Visual Arts in New York, USA, after reflecting on capitalist lifestyle and aspirational aesthetics.
The works of Debora Delmar Corp. have explored topics such as trending colour schemes in branding, corporate merchandising techniques irl and url, class issues created by producer and consumer relationships, international trading markets, as well as local and mass production; real estate, home décor and commercial interior design as contexts for consumption, business ideology and the circulation of images from high to low culture. The Debora Delmar Corp.’s logo was in fact commandeered by a chain of hospitals in Los Angeles and later tattooed onto the hips of supermodels Cara Delevigne and Jourdan Dunn.
The gallery is also presenting Test Run: Performance in Public – a multidisciplinary project of ideas, including live performances, talks, workshops and films; and this spring, will explore the idea of the “commons” – the physical, digital, conceptual and public spaces that we, as individuals and as part of wider society, relate to each day.
Test Run focuses on artists who use public space specifically for performance. From mid-summer festivals to political protests, the village green to the town square – the public arena has always been a site for artistic expression and radical action. Through a selection of new and historical works, this edition of Test Run examines what happens when “normal behaviour” in public spaces is disrupted – a woman takes a man for a walk on a lead, a man forms the start of a queue for nothing – and how expectations of public behaviour can be exploited.
Using film and documentary material, discussions and interactive sessions, Test Run will explore the making, curating and presenting of performance in public space. Including live performance, talks, workshops and a series of three new commissions, Test Run links the interior space of the gallery to public locations in Oxford’s city centre.
The series of projects will include the following artists: Günter Brus | Jeremy Deller | Song Dong | Rose English | Valie Export | Alicia Frankovich | Jefford Horrigan | William Hunt | Sanja Iveković | Serena Korda | Bruce Lacey | Jérôme Leuba | Klara Lidén | Lilly McElroy | Florence Peake | Alex Schady | Mike Smith | Theatre of Mistakes | Gillian Wearing
Debora Delmar Corp. Upward Mobility – Modern Art Oxford – 27 March to 17 May 2015
Test Run – Modern Art Oxford – 27 March to 17 May 2015