50 year accumulation 2 day sale (2019)
Dahlia Elsayed & Andrew Demirjian
Music by: Matthew Gantt
The project is an exploration of the end-life of material objects told through the visual and linguistic aesthetics of online estate sales. It presents the afterlife of fulfilled desires and the unseen epilogue to the advertising industry’s narrative of happiness through ownership. This collaboration draws from the vernacular images of online estate sales featuring dramatic enlargements of hurried, functional photography of over-packed closets, overflowing dressers, musty basements and random juxtaposed objects.
The work shifts the context from hastily taken images for explanatory display to lure visitors to upcoming sales to one of poetry, producing a poem with a subtext of demise and the hereafter of need. The poem’s text is exclusively drawn from online descriptions of images, using a syncopated delivery from two people, sometimes speaking simultaneously, other times sequentially. The intriguing combinations of language reveal the rituals and patterns established by this cultural outgrowth of late capitalism. The work creates a visual clash between the unseen and seen, making strange the public presentation of intimate private interiors. This project asks what happens to desires when our objects outlive their owners?
This video poem is an extension of Andrew’s media practice that scrapes, remixes and syncopates archives of texts, images and sounds to create new expressive forms. He is interested in analyzing the value systems embedded in Internet culture and critiquing the taken for granted systems that structure thinking and guide behavior.