Josephine Meckseper’s photographs and mixed‑medium installations cunningly expose the links between politics and the consumer worlds of fashion and advertising. The artist grew up in an artistic family with ties to the revolutionary left (her father, artist Friedrich Meckseper, had anarchist inclinations and her mother has been an elected representative of the Green Party).
[+] moreAfter moving from Berlin to the United States, Meckseper studied at California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, where she produced her first photographic and film work during the 1992 riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King police‑brutality trial in Los Angeles. Continuous media coverage of the escalating tension between local African Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department turned the events into spectacle. Images of burning buildings, the looting of stores, bystanders getting beaten, and rioters firing at police alternated with advertisements on television news shows, prompting Meckseper to question the way protest culture is aligned with consumption and fashion in our media‑saturated age. Her signature installations involve various forms of display —sleek mirrored shelves, chromed glass vitrines— filled with eclectic scraps from consumer society and political culture. Riffing on shopwindow décor and ethnographic museum displays, these hybrid groupings comment upon the homogenous culture global capitalism has created and the leveling of differences in consumer society.
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In Meckseper’s photographic series Blow‑Up (2006), models are dressed in sturdy elastic stockings and the 1950s lingerie that is still sold in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. These life‑size pictures are displayed on a wall that is covered from floor to ceiling with reflective wallpaper printed with pages from the 1976 German mail‑order catalogue Quelle International. The home products and clothing offered for sale in that publication are those that Meckseper grew up with in divided Germany, and they summon the contrasts between the tastes of Western European middle classes and the Eastern Bloc’s mass‑produced, functional, and uniform fashion, which, the artist says, was “part of a planned economy and not a status symbol.” Blow‑Up and Quelle International, the artist’s 2008 series of photographs based on the catalogue, use advertising’s semantic codes—posing models, flashy backdrops, and end‑of‑season sales—to address its persuasive impact and reflect Meckseper’s investigation of the ways that political power is articulated in advertising in a world consumed by appearances.
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