Rachel Perry Welty
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Work from Spam Messages.
“Spam is a daily annoyance, but in these words that came to my inbox, I found something accidentally poetic. I was struck by the sheer possibility suggested by these messages. Taken out of the context for which they were intended, and re-inserted into another kind of economy (that of the gallery) the words become something hopeful and quite beautiful.” – Rachel Perry Welty
“With a sharp eye for the aesthetic possibilities of everyday refuse, Welty uses familiar materials in startling ways. Her drawings, made from used fruit stickers she obsessively collects, slices and arranges into zany geometric abstractions, combine Minimalist aesthetics with Pop humor. The abstract spiraling shapes suggest both the circuitous journey produce makes from point of origin to consumer and the endless cycle of daily food consumption. As she states: “We shop, eat, sleep and then get up and do it all over again.” Welty sees the stickers as visual remnants rich with information – economic, political, geographic and social. In the wall sculpture Daily Bread, Welty organized seven years of bread tags collected in the kitchen drawer into a pastel grid to form a calendar of her family’s bread consumption.
Throughout her career, Welty has used various forms of communication as both material and
subject matter. The video Karaoke Wrong Number features the artist expertly lip-synching wrong number messages left inadvertently on her answering machine over a two year period. With performances both funny and poignant, Welty conjures a variety of personalities and touches upon issues of privacy, identity, expectation and assumption. For her Spam Message wall sculptures, Welty uses a single sheet of aluminum foil, crushed and formed by hand into words, to immortalize the accidental bits of poetry sent through cyberspace by strangers to unknown recipients. About the piece You May Already Be a Winner, Welty comments, “I was struck by the sheer possibility suggested by these words. Taken out of context… the words become something hopeful and beautiful.””- Yancey Richardson Gallery