Quality Gifts
Sentimentality comes up short-change in an economy of kindness.
Quality Gifts, exhibited at BPA Gallery, Köln, proposes a confrontation with the faithful adage concerning ‘the body as the vessel for the spirit’. The vessel, as proposed by David Moser, is the body standardized and the spirit made bankrupt in the wake of one-time-use society. With the installation of Quality Gifts, Moser reenacts daily exchanges between the body and devices of category and dissemination by presenting the intimate proof of their transactions. Capturing and reenacting the body in the process of being approximated for size, length, means of celebration, disease status and refreshment, to reveal a terrible average between the units of measure; Moser creates a dark kaleidoscope of self-reflexive signifiers, which refer to a variable arbitrary while cannibalizing precious relations into commodity. In ‘Quality Gifts’ (2022), labor becomes indistinguishable from the physical operations of life, made clear from the work central to the exhibition - in which a row of red balloons, first erect with breath and increasingly dogged and flaccid throughout the course of the exhibition, reflect their image in mean sheets of glass – as witness to their own deterioration. Here, the debt of love hours is tallied but also the aptitude of lung, mirrored in the floorwork ‘Echo’ (2022), quantified with a large L, an obscure allusion to a dominant system of arbitrary measurement. The works and their architectural relationships are haunted by a pseudo-subject which is only perceptible from its outline, in a name scrawled on a disposal coffee cup or a medical sample of synthetic urine marked with the surname of the artist. In ‘McDavid’ the relationship between the owner(s) depicted remains indeterminable, piss and coffee housed seperately in industrial holds, rendering both liquids utilitarian and clinical. Despite spelling the artists name, the work further alludes to a facsimile identity which serves as a frame of exchange, to pronounce the exploitation and consolidation of our most precious gifts with those most readily disposable. They suggest a reevaluation of the categorical indexes of identity in relation to body, made apparent by Moser in isolating the human trace against hard materials, making their oblique relations appear tragic. Another indicator of size-type, ‘XL’ dresses the interior of the exhibition space, which appears on the exterior as a quotidien shopfront, but inside the viewer is affronted with a black mirror. The body before it becomes anonymized in the shadow of its reflection, quantified by a size which refers only to the unfamiliar. The violence of the body and identity in relation to the materials which constrain and determine their constitutions are most explicitly wrought in Moser’s reflections. In reflection, dislocation and isolation, Quality Gifts redeploys the same mechanisms inherent to daily life, eliciting an exterior recognition of the frail rebellion of the body.
Text by Alex Thake
Quality Gifts
Sentimentality comes up short-change in an economy of kindness.
Quality Gifts, exhibited at BPA Gallery, Köln, proposes a confrontation with the faithful adage concerning ‘the body as the vessel for the spirit’. The vessel, as proposed by David Moser, is the body standardized and the spirit made bankrupt in the wake of one-time-use society. With the installation of Quality Gifts, Moser reenacts daily exchanges between the body and devices of category and dissemination by presenting the intimate proof of their transactions. Capturing and reenacting the body in the process of being approximated for size, length, means of celebration, disease status and refreshment, to reveal a terrible average between the units of measure; Moser creates a dark kaleidoscope of self-reflexive signifiers, which refer to a variable arbitrary while cannibalizing precious relations into commodity. In ‘Quality Gifts’ (2022), labor becomes indistinguishable from the physical operations of life, made clear from the work central to the exhibition - in which a row of red balloons, first erect with breath and increasingly dogged and flaccid throughout the course of the exhibition, reflect their image in mean sheets of glass – as witness to their own deterioration. Here, the debt of love hours is tallied but also the aptitude of lung, mirrored in the floorwork ‘Echo’ (2022), quantified with a large L, an obscure allusion to a dominant system of arbitrary measurement. The works and their architectural relationships are haunted by a pseudo-subject which is only perceptible from its outline, in a name scrawled on a disposal coffee cup or a medical sample of synthetic urine marked with the surname of the artist. In ‘McDavid’ the relationship between the owner(s) depicted remains indeterminable, piss and coffee housed seperately in industrial holds, rendering both liquids utilitarian and clinical. Despite spelling the artists name, the work further alludes to a facsimile identity which serves as a frame of exchange, to pronounce the exploitation and consolidation of our most precious gifts with those most readily disposable. They suggest a reevaluation of the categorical indexes of identity in relation to body, made apparent by Moser in isolating the human trace against hard materials, making their oblique relations appear tragic. Another indicator of size-type, ‘XL’ dresses the interior of the exhibition space, which appears on the exterior as a quotidien shopfront, but inside the viewer is affronted with a black mirror. The body before it becomes anonymized in the shadow of its reflection, quantified by a size which refers only to the unfamiliar. The violence of the body and identity in relation to the materials which constrain and determine their constitutions are most explicitly wrought in Moser’s reflections. In reflection, dislocation and isolation, Quality Gifts redeploys the same mechanisms inherent to daily life, eliciting an exterior recognition of the frail rebellion of the body.
Text by Alex Thake