NADA Miami 2020

Stems Gallery is excited to propose “The Spectacle,” a group presentation featuring works by Mario Ayala, Julien Boudet, Susumu Kamijo, Léo Luccioni & Tyrrell Winston.

The works presented will investigate the cross-section between consumerism, technology, culture, and media. By highlighting and recontextualizing diverse elements of today’s society, the featured works will lay the base for a body of work that focuses on elements associated with pop culture and consumerist dystopias. In his influential book “The Society of the Spectacle” 1, French philosopher Guy Debord depicts the scenario of a new era – one in which modern society, characterized by its consumer culture, has been replaced by its representation, “a spectacle.”

For Debord, the modern image flow is at the center of how power relationships enact in society. In his book, he describes how we are all actors with preordained roles, passive participants in a display that is repeated over and over again. As such, it is following Debord’s notion of ‘the spectacle’ that this group show came to be. Hosted in a typical Brussels apartment, the exhibition also aims to rethink the common space in a time of overexposure to domestic spaces. Manufactured fantasy in the context of consumerism is reframed in this multi-media exploration of popular culture and contemporary society. Fashion brands, internet, sports, food, homies, superheroes, pets: all of these imageries are interpreted here as new myths of the spectacle, remodeled in new materials and offering a new vision in which desire for consumption shapes a new order in the field of culture. Through the appropriation of images inserted into society, the works comprised in this exhibition examine how contemporary artists blend elements of consumption to illuminate current shifts in the way that images are being created and consumed, questioning our relationship with our so-called “culture.”