Press Release by Faurschou Foundation
"BAG OF CANDLES" IS THE FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION BY AMERICAN ARTIST ZACHARY ARMSTRONG IN CHINA AND IS HIS MOST COMPREHENSIVE EXHIBITION TO DATE.
For the exhibition, Armstrong has created a new body of work, including bags stuffed with hand-crafted wax candles, a life-size bronze cast of a t-rex skull and a walk-in model of a doll house built of wax painted canvases. The result is a vast assemblage of remarkable objects – a contemporary Wunderkammer - spanning from Armstrong’s densely storied drawings to his simple pottery work and naive cartoonish imagery of his wax paintings and sculptural works.
Through Armstrong’s material-oriented approach and diverse range of techniques, sensibility, image and process are experienced as one in his works. With the wax candle works at its heart, the exhibition delves into materiality as a structure for exploring the personal in Armstrong’s works. Wax is a key material in Armstrong’s practice and the candles are for the artist a symbol of childhood memories as he would collect them as a child. In the exhibition, the candles become a symbol of obsessive collecting, which is inherent in the long tradition of collecting practices of museums and in the consumerist culture of the contemporary world at large.
Accumulations, build-ups, collections and repetitions peek through everywhere in the exhibition where Armstrong’s use of the same figures and motifs are repeated across various media, always entering new relations and unavoidably changing character and form. For Armstrong, one work is always a study for the next, be it the reproduction of a fish painting, the Elder-Beerman logo, or pop cultural imagery, such as dinosaurs and sheep, commonly found in commerce’s youth products.
In Bag of Candles, Armstrong exposes the personal in relation to the outside, commercialized world and explores how it interferes with our imagination and everyday life. In Armstrong’s works, meaning is always ambiguous, and the form is always flexible, opening up to a universe of ever-evolving transformation of materials and motifs, which is at the same time surprising, serious and playful.
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