Back to the exhibits page Project Placement 1er Décembre 2006 - 1er Mars 2007 Vernissage le 30 Novembre 2006 dès 18h Curated by Joseph Del Pesco The artworks in Project Placement employ the popular marketing strategy of product placement. This contentious injection of commerce into cultural media has become a successful means of associating objects, ideas and their value with the characters and narratives of movies, television, and more recently books and video games. By borrowing this device, the artists in Project Placement propose an inhabitation of preexisting modes of public communication, mass production and distribution. However, in Project Placement, the content delivered and the locations of placement have been expanded to include a diverse array of approaches including: appearances by the artist, an intervention of ersatz products at a local flea market, or a catalyst for future contact. Some of the more subtle forms of product placement require close inspection and are made visible by accumulation. While working as a photographer for the Crate & Barrel catalog, Marc Horowitz wrote his own phone number on a white board in a model living room scene with the message "Dinner w/ Marc." The catalog carrying his note was subsequently distributed across the country. After receiving scores of calls, Marc embarked on a tour of the US to meet strangers for dinner. Dinner With Marc, documents this voyage. Starting in 2000, Gianni Motti followed the photographers of various newspapers in Europe until his image was in every section of the paper. 6 years later his image, and that of his assistants, have been seen in newspapers across Europe. In “Reviews“, Interventions Motti presents an accumulation of newspapers from the last six years of this ongoing project. In the animation White Light by Jay Heikes, drawings infect clips from music videos. Heikes' silent video amplifies the aura of rock music's image consciousness. First described by the San Francisco based Pond organization, Shopdropping is the strategy of placing artworks among the aisles of products, interrupting the shoppers' point-of-purchase experience. Aligned with this strategy, Zoe Sheehan Saldana's Shopdropping Wal-Mart Clothes series places replicas of inexpensive, mass produced garments back onto the racks of the mega-store. The subtle discrepancies apparent between the reconstructed garments and the originals create a dissonance, locating the gesture between gift and critique. Tangentially related to shopdropping, Mads Lynnerup's video Shopping Cart involves an invisible shopper guiding a trolley full of products through the aisles of a busy grocery store and up to the check-out station. The exhibition also includes several works made specifically for the exhibition. Amy Balkin's Radical Cola Challenge is a taste-test with political implications - comparing the ideological interests, real and implied, underlying products of the multinational cola industry. Included in the challenge is Danish artist group Superflex's Guarana Power, and the open source recipe project Cube Cola. (Kate Rich from Cube Cola will be in attendance at the opening to assist in presenting the challenge). Packard Jennings uses sequential drawing to imagine a revolt taking place on the streets of Geneva that leads to a shangri-la of free love with bon-fires in the vaults of local banks and the meeting rooms of the UN. Jennings will be distributing his instructional booklet at various tourist sites around the city. Conrad Bakker's Untitled Project: Market [Geneva] involves the production of hand-carved-and-painted-wood replicas of commodities the artist associates with Geneva, the city's Calvinist history and the gallery itself. These will first be presented in the local flea market alongside real products. List of artists & works: Amy Balkin (San Francisco, California) Cola Challenge, 2006 Conrad Bakker (Chicago, Illinois) Untitled Project: Market [Geneva], 2006 Jay Heikes (Minneapolis, Minnesota) White Light, 2002 Marc Horowitz (San Francisco, California) Dinner With Marc, 2004 Packard Jennings (San Francisco, California) Welcome to Geneva! (instuctional pamphlet), 2006 Mads Lynnerup (New York, NY) Shopping Cart, 2006 Zoë Sheehan Saldaña (New York, NY) Shopdropping Wal-Mart Clothes, 2003-6 Gianni Motti (Italy) “Reviews“, Interventions, 2000-2006 Press Lire les articles parus dans Le Courrier et dans Le Temps (décembre 2006). Lire les autres articles sur Project Placement. Communiqué de presse Press release Présentation du curateur par Ralph Rugoff: The Curator who saved the world Le Commissaire d’exposition qui sauva le Monde

Amy Balkin, Cola Challenge, 2006 Conrad Bakker, Untitled Project: Market [Geneva], 2006, objets en bois Gianni Motti, "Reviews" Interventions, 2000-2006, impression de journaux sur papier archive Jay Heikes, White Light, 2002, vidéo Mads Lynnerup, Shopping Cart, 2006, video Marc Horowitz, The National Dinner Tour, 2004, photographie Packard Jennings, Welcome to Geneva, 2006, impression sur papier Zoë Sheehan Saldãna, Shopdropping Wal-Mart Clothes, 2003-2006, Shirt