¤David Grainger
Heartburst, video, 2006

¤Jesse Robinson
Champagne Vigil, collage, 2007

¤James Sham
For Tantalus, performance still, 2006

COLLEGE PARK, MD – Our society is often described as commodified. A world in which people are defined by the things they consume and human interactions have been replaced with object interactions. Mass consumption has produced a world so permeated by identical objects and bland sameness that it has become difficult to differentiate between one stretch of suburban highway and another. How can we sift through this homogeneity and find meaning? More specifically, how might artists redesign the landscape of this material world into something evocative?

David Grainger, Jesse Robinson, and James Sham posit new interpretations of technological change and growth that empower human beings to create deep meaning in a modern society. Specifically, Grainger uses everyday and domesticated objects to create a visual trickery or immediacy that arouses wonderment and the cultivation of deep personal meaning. Robinson creates work that intrudes upon the system of exchange of mass-produced objects in order to rescue these materials and the humans who use them from alienation and “bleak boredom”. Sham uses found objects and performs everyday physical tasks to create interactions between socially estranged individuals, infusing his personal universe and broader surrounding community with renewed humanism.

If human interaction with the environment leaves the sediment or residue of human memory, then artists working today are left with rich and meaningful store of material.