the archives

Luis Maldonado: It's All About Things

threewallsRESIDENCIES

On View: March 2nd – March 31st, 2007
T-Th 12-6 pm: auction viewing

For the month of March, ThreeWalls is turning over their exhibition space to resident artist Luis Maldonado for a Chicago incarnation of his traveling shanty-bazaar: It’s All About Things Chicago: Barter Days – A New Type of Auction House. Building shanty-style stalls within the gallery from scavenged wood, tarps and cardboard, Maldonado will transform the white cube into a lean-to auction house. Each weekend, Maldonado will open the floor for bartering, hosting an all day, thematic performance, including special event days where collectors can “sing a song, receive a thing.”

Separate stalls include a “Welcome Station” where collectors can receive IAAT info, “IAAT Lounge” where collectors can rest, be refreshed and entertained, “The Private Viewing Room” for contemplation of objects under more gracious conditions and “The Bartering Station,” where the action (and business) will go down.  Maldonado will be on site throughout the run of the exhibition to tour visitors and explain the works on view, including “Things Received Chicago” where items received from barter will be displayed. Lastly, a ‘gift shop,’ “For Sale, Something New/Something Old,” will make sure, if you’re too shy to haggle, that you go home with an IAAT souvenir.

Inspired in part by Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where Heidegger adopts the term “thing” to debunk the phrase “a work of art,” and in part by his own experience working at Christie’s Auction House in New York City, Maldonado contrasts the inflated value of objects at auction with objects available through barter, challenging the value system placed on objects by a culture consumed with accumulation and collection.

Barter Days is a branch of Maldonado’s ongoing project It’s All About Things: “a little company that studies human relationships, with, things.” Made up of many branches, IAAT is show room for “things” and a traveling concept that is continuously developing. The things received in barter, in exchange for the things in the show room, are placed into a permanent collection and later shown as works of art. As Maldonado increases the IAAT Permanent Collection, he plans to curate shows as an ongoing evolution of the project.

Luis Maldonado received his M.F.A. in Painting from SUNY Purchase College in 2005. He has been a resident at Public Intervention under the tutelage of Alfredo Jaar at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria in 2004.  He has exhibited at The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill NY;  Dolly Maass Gallery, SUNY Purchase,  Purchase, NY;  Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY and Northern Illinois University Anthropology Museum, De Kalb, IL. IAAT will travel this fall to Third Rail in Larchmont, N.Y.

Links:

Maldonado in Chicago Reader

Maldonado on 'Re: an artist's and writer's collective'

Maldonado at Susan Eley Fine Art