unmonumental

Joy Garnett’s photo of a scoop of ice cream melting on industrial carpet is evocative and wonderfully strange; the ice cream looks like an unidentifiable organism, while the melting alludes cleverly to global warming. The chemical nature of the industrial carpet is almost grisly when juxtaposed with the living, breathing feeling of the dessert.

– Laila Pedro, Idiom Magazine: What Matters Most at Exit Art.

http://unmonumental.org

(2008 – ongoing)

unmonumental was born in the Spring of 2008 after a visit to the Unmonumental exhibition at New York’s New Museum, which set out to explore fragmented forms, torn pictures… crumbling symbols and broken icons. Back on the street, Garnett shot a photograph of a junk-filled shopping cart and posted it on twitter with the hashtag #unmonumental. She continued to shoot and post photographs of discarded objects on a daily basis. She re-visited Robert Smithson’s “Monuments of Passaic”¹ and George Brassaï’s “Involuntary Sculptures”² and what began as twitter snark grew into a long-term exploration of impermanence through street photography.

Follow unmonumental on Instagram (#unmonumental; #unmonumentalwest)

Notes:

1) Smithson, R. Monuments of Passaic, Artforum, December 1967.

2) Brassaï, G. Sculptures involontaires, Minotaure, n° 3-4, déc 1933.