St Frigo 1996

Curator: Jimmie Durham's "St Frigo" from 1996 presents us with an object of disconcerting familiarity. Editor: It immediately strikes me as melancholic, almost ghostlike. The speckled white surface and tilting base lend it an air of vulnerability. Curator: The piece is a mixed-media assemblage, a sort of readymade sculpture playing with ideas of appropriation and the found object. Note how the everyday, a mundane refrigerator, has been transformed. Editor: Exactly. By focusing on its material presence, its aged exterior marked by what looks like paint splatters, the artist forces us to confront the cultural baggage inherent in the everyday. This refrigerator, no longer pristine, speaks to labor and possibly obsolescence. Curator: Durham challenges the classical definition of sculpture. There is a deliberate crudeness here. Consider the tilt; the level of craft seemingly intentionally diminished. This isn't a celebration of skill, but an invitation to question value. Editor: It seems as though he's imbuing the mundane with a kind of poetic decay, transforming something so commonplace into a rumination on materiality and waste, even the consumption and disposal patterns of contemporary society. This could even be viewed as a comment on consumer culture's ephemerality. Curator: A strong point. Furthermore, within the structural arrangements, there is a semiotic play. What does the refrigerator signify in our contemporary consciousness? A space for preservation, but perhaps also a symbol of bourgeois life? Durham turns this inside out. Editor: So, while Durham presents this decaying object, he confronts us not only with questions surrounding labor and the ephemerality of consumer culture but equally asks us to reconsider how meaning is constructed within postmodern spaces. It definitely gives food for thought, in every sense of the word! Curator: Indeed, a work where formal choices provoke an introspective re-evaluation. Editor: Absolutely. An unexpectedly poignant transformation.