Josephine Meckseper

Over the past ten years, the New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper has developed a practice that melds the aesthetic language of modernism with a profound critique of consumerism. Meckseper employs window displays, vitrines, installations, photographs, films and magazines to explore how consumer culture defines subjectivity. In this volume, published for her 2011 solo exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, Meckseper presents a series of new works focusing on display modes of retail environments such as car dealerships, highlighting their aesthetic overlap with mid-century modernism. Chrome car rims sit atop mirrored pedestals; sleek corporate logos populate wall assemblages; and canvases are shrinkwrapped in plastic. Meckseper’s new vitrines, stocked with familiar and unfamiliar objects, function as time capsules of contemporary culture. The works in this catalogue possess a monumental quality, bearing as they do the insignia of American power and authority--flags, eagles and car logos.