On July 20th, 2016, the New Museum on Bowery will open its doors to its latest exhibition The Keeper. The exhibition features the largest amount of work the museum has shown to date; spotlighting personal stockpiles, unusual fascinations, and intricate minds which encompass a massive span of history. From the mundane to the highly prized, to the irrational, the show tells a story of something we can all relate to: our personal treasures.
We all collect things; whether actively or subconsciously, and we all have personal artifacts that we refuse to let go of. Be it an old sweater from your teenage years or a chipped mug an old friend gave you, we all ignore our logical minds from time to time to hold onto things that might look better in the bin. We can’t ignore our emotions, but what happens when collecting becomes an obsession?
The largest collective work in this show is ‘Partners: The Teddy Bear Project’ by Ydessa Hendeles, a 3000 strong collection of family-album framed photographs of people with teddy bears dating from roughly 1900-1940, including vitrines of antique bears. The collection is vast, spanning two double-height rooms. Like the people in the photos, the bears not only become a memory, but also a physical preservation of the individual subject’s life. The sheer quantity of imagery is overwhelming, and the dedication to the artist’s pursuit is absolute.
Brooklyn-based artist Yuji Agematsu makes one work per calendar day. These tiny cigarette-sleeve bags of fragments are made up of the unassuming, the discarded, the wasted. Agematsu collects detritus from the streets – anything from hair to rocks, chewing gum to plastic – items that have been changed by time. The assemblages bring the otherwise inanimate fragments a new lease of life, bringing them color, vitality, and resoluteness. The disgusting becomes the treasured, and the hopeless becomes the accomplished.
While browsing a junk shop, Artist Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser discovered a wealth of intricate, architectural constructions made by Austrian insurance clerk Peter Fritz. 387 constructions to be exact. Displayed on a large plinth, a selection of 126 of these buildings are shown, made from everyday materials such as matchboxes, plastic, and cardboard. The buildings are incredibly detailed, based on imaginary Swiss architecture.
After her release from a psychiatric unit in 1995 and convinced demonic beings were torturing people on the underground with portable uranium devices, Vanda Vieira-Schmidt has been obsessively creating mathematical drawings and diagrams on A4 paper, often thousands a day in an attempt to combat this problem head-on. The drawings act as more than an attempt to keep Vieira-Schmidt’s peace of mind – for the artist, these works can directly influence world peace and war can be limited by the drawings.
The exhibition is on view until 09/25/2016.