Exhibition
The Coke Factory - Ritter Zamet
'Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.' Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918
Welcome to The Coke Factory. This group exhibition provides a site-specific presentation of the work of a new group of artists that have arisen from New York in recent years. Through placement of these artists within the conceptual bounds of a conventional industrial ‘factory’, this exhibition will seek to reveal and examine their creative motives, methods and the result of their productivity in the context of the dynamic society that they inhabit. The Coke Factory will principally act as a vehicle for interpretation, its utilitarian backdrop facilitating a portal through which the collective social commentary of the artists and their aesthetic energies can showcase the potent cultural domain and influence of New York City.
The Coke Factory recognises and pays tribute to the hyper-consumerist framework of Capitalist America with its epicenter, New York, embodying the inner-workings of the modern industrial factory. This is duly expressed in a multitude of lines and grids, streets and avenues, lights and cars, noise and pollution which replicate the mechanised production lines, the conveyor belts, the billowing of smoke and the mass yield of manufacture. New York, in this instance, cannot be overlooked as an environmental hub that becomes vital to the artist’s intellectual modes of creativity and origination. Indeed, environment suggests that of a stage or a platform intertwined with its inherent social and cultural forces at work within a city that is never still, never at rest, never at peace. The Coke Factory comprises artists who are embedded in this reality and sentiment.
