Jan Albers, Ray Beldner, Oliver Boberg, Rob Fischer, Barbara Hatfield, John Issacs, Nina Katchadourian, Andrei Molodkin, Julie Moos, Ruth Root, Jonathan Seliger, Jude Tallichet

Commodities exchange both literally and metaphorically underscores our understanding of civilization. As far back as the 2nd century BC, the interconnected series of trade routes known as The Silk Road was a vital network of capillaries that pumped commodities—gold, silk, ivory, furs, plants, iron, jade, grain, Bronze, spices – throughout Asia. It was inextricably bound to the formation and subsistence of Roman, Chinese, Mesopotamian, Persian, and Indian civilizations. Indeed, our own recent history demonstrates that not so long ago, Manhattan was traded for a nutmeg plantation.

Today, (as perhaps always), the relationship between consumer and producer at times seems entirely fractured. Although, the exchange of raw commodities violently affects our day-to-day lives, the disconnect between consumer and producer can be characterized as a crisis. The artists in Bushels, Bundles, & Barrels do not explicitly deal with the complex, often arcane mechanisms that govern commodities exchange but each work has been selected to focus our attentions on our own relationship to consumption, and by extension the wider issues at stake. As repositories of cultural information, the works are sly, whimsical, overtly political, unabashedly moral, and seductive and often times ambivalent. Many artists in this exhibition have simply used or referred to raw materials such as Jude Tallichet’s gold painted coral reef like filigree, Oliver Boberg’s illusionist photographs that transform common cotton balls into cloudy skies, or the magnified kernel of popcorn in Nina Katchadourian’s Asteroid #4 (2001).