Dream Sellers, a two person exhibition at Victori + Mo Gallery in New York, New York with Alex Ebstein
Consider the life peddled to you - through pervasive cultural bias, gender stereotypes, and capitalism. The way your home looks, how you clothe yourself, access to nature and beauty. These are all topics ripe in the works of Alex Ebstein and Amy Boone-McCreesh. Dream Sellers examines the markers of success through the lens of societal pressures. Artists have long held mirrors to the worlds in which they live and Ebstein and Boone-McCreesh visually unravel what it means to exist today in a series of tactile, mixed media works. Topics including body shape preferences, advertising, slick store displays, and do- mestic life are pulled apart to question long held assumptions on class and the notion of upward mobility.
Amy Boone-McCreesh utilizes maximal aesthetics and visual tropes of grandeur in a new series that conflates window views and consumption of luxury goods. Her formative experiences growing up in a low socio-economic setting have led to further examinations of markers of success and how they manifest visually. The commodified access to beauty and nature mix with a knee-jerk opposition to notions of “good” taste in her colorful mixed-media spaces. Hand-cut collaged works on paper are informed by the labor of craft and domesticity. This is countered by the precise geometry of interior spaces and the machine-cut, synthetic materials present in the curtain-like window hangings and wall charms. Borrowing from the world she inhabits, Boone-McCreesh aspires to visually delight while questioning the prominent tastes of cultural acceptance.
Together, Alex and Amy probe at the standards and aesthetic perimeters that ensnare women, asking questions through their visual vocabularies. Mimicking the culture being sold to them, they aim to create “beauty” while testing the exclusionary limitations of the concept. The moving target of success, as it relates to the pressure to have a certain home or domestic life, fitness goals, trend conformity and other slippery milestones, tinges their work with an inescapable anxiety. Underscoring their mutual fascination with brand collaborations, limited editions and the mechanism of scarcity in art, beauty and fashion, the artists worked together to create a set of small sculptures that straddle high and low aesthetics.