2022
ECOLOGIES OF SCALE
Depot Art Gallery
Blinds
54 cm X 45 cm W
Materials: Linen and plastic switch cover on wood.
Insurance
23 cm X 23 cm W
Materials: Wax, plastic, and plaster on wood board.
Llenyd Price, Michael Lowe, Elise McDermott
Your affordable urban oasis awaits. Freshly developed with modern features, jump on the property escalator and become the proud owner of this charming family home. Don’t mind the discarded materials and rubble in the frame, these will be out of sight and mind once you take your first step through that heavy, shrink-wrap protected front door. We figured you might appreciate how BRAND NEW this hidden gem is — after all, what is home but a six-figure return on investment!
Combining discarded offcuts from the construction industry, unconventional uses of mundane materials, and a general sense of late capitalist malaise, Ecologies of Scale explores feelings of helplessness when faced with an insatiable property market, the legitimate need for housing, and the inability to reconcile these challenges sustainably in the current economic climate.
Beneath the surface of pristine new builds and urban housing developments lies the hidden ecological costs of material waste and overproduction, a reality we are all aware of yet feel entrapped by in order to live affordably in an ever-growing city. Economies of scale refers to the dynamic whereby mass production of a commodity lowers the cost of individual units, so long as there is a surplus of demand in the market; when demand for a commodity such as housing is at an all-time high, it is more economical to create waste products than to conserve on material expenditure.
In this exhibition, Michael Lowe brings his experience in the urban design and architecture industries to task in the production of the sculpture ‘Bottomless skip’; the remaining use value of discarded construction materials are re-employed by Elise McDermott to unpack notions of ownership and purpose in relation to physical objects, and sensitive compositions of cement, repurposed wood, wall filler and other urban substances form abstract environments in the paintings of Llenyd Price. By subverting the expected use-value of building materials, these emerging artists re-present the fabric of Tāmaki Makaurau’s built environment in ways that highlight the unnecessary by-products of necessary urban growth.
