one pic tuesday. Brad Troemel
Victorian Gingerbread Home #2 and 1,500 Dubia Roaches, 2016
gingerbread, royal icing, assorted candies, coconut shreds, roaches, styrofoam, paper towels, plexiglass and stainless steel, 77.5 x 61 x 8.9 cm
courtesy of Feuer/Mesler, New York
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If I would dare to describe the practice of BRAD TROEMEL, I would probably used adjectives such rebellious, anarchic, conceptual and ironic. A few years ago I would have probably used the term ‘punk’ to define his offline and online activities, which now include baking gingerbread houses.
TROEMEL used art and his art as a tool for subverting verbal and visual logic. His new body of work currently presented at Feuer/Mesler in New York is no exception. Entitled New and Handmade By Me, the show presents a series of sculpture and wall works, each exploring different methods of DIY fabrication pulled from both Pinterest tutorials and Survivalist communities. According to TROEMEL, the works ‘he chose to make for this exhibition are based on Pinterest tutorials where the end result wasn’t fully known in advance. These were tutorials that opened up the process to a greater degree of customization, randomization, and innovation’.
The group of works that emerges from this labour-DIY mode of production (which was available to follow via his instagram) and especially its alignment of value with craftsmanship, is a rather sharp comment to conservatism.
I’m always thinking about how to make a living. How can I continue making the art I want to make, get exhibitions, and pay my bills/student loans? I have a pretty zealous habit of bankrupting myself in the process of making these new exhibitions, with high stakes plans that the money will come back to me via sales. It’s not gambling if you make your own luck. The biggest expense in making new work is that you have to buy new materials and figure out how to use them from scratch, which usually requires buying more and more of that material until you know how to work it just right. Failed material tests lead to what I call production schedule “traffic jams” in money, space, and time where potential ideas outpace the material possibilities of what you can work on at a given point. Ever try driving a U-Haul in New York? The traffic is terrible. – BRAD TROEMEL for the press release of New and Handmade By Me at Feuer / Mesler
New and Handmade By Me BRAD TROEMEL is on view at Feuer/Mesler in New York until May 8, 2016.
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