January 11 - February 3, 2013

"More and more, more is more." -Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace" (2001)
"More is more." -Heidi Montag, "More is More" (2009)

"More and More, More is More" critically engages with the overwhelming detritus of our everyday lives, the remainders of our collisions with technology, environment and culture. It celebrates chaos over order, noise over signal, accident over intent, excess over restraint. The artists and designers gathered in "More and More, More is More" all treat this detritus-as thematic content, material, or process-as a necessary consequence of contemporary life.
Some works, like Ed Brown's Big Pixel, translate digital phenomena into physical objects in order to investigate how an increasingly cluttered digital landscape invades our interior lives. Others examine the role of a manically overproduced celebrity culture in this invasion of interiority. In all cases there remains a frisson of pleasure in the surrender. Many artists and designers in "More and More, More is More" use found, abandoned objects and scenarios as raw materials. Josephine Devanbu's Victory salvages discarded plastic jewelry containers from a recently demolished factory in Providence to create a structurally sound column. By privileging the garbage of a vanishing age, Victory interrogates the nature of collective memory in postindustrial capitalism. The Billiard Room, by Abigail Burpee, addresses a more domestic sphere of consumption and novelty with wit and pathos.
Other works, like Underwater World by Alicia Dolabaille and Camila Morales, seek transcendence in the repetition of cheap and commonly available materials, as if, like in The Guy Gilbert's Outreach Ill Tree Diorama, ritualizing our relationship to disorder can save us from obsolescence. The Big Blues, by Cristobal Cea, addresses the powerful wish for such salvation, however fleeting. Obsolescence, however, is not a process that can be reversed. More and more, our interior lives and built environments fill up with new objects, crowding out anything that lingers for too long in our consciousness. Paradoxically, this leads us to create more hard-won meaning from those odd bits, those remainders that resonate with us.

Curated by Lisa laboni and Elizabeth Rossiter
MFA Digital Media 2013