The Wear and Tear of Art: A Disaster Zone in an Abandoned Theater Set

The installation A Disaster Zone in an Abandoned Theatre Set occupies a central place in this exhibition, which features of new body of work by Milutin Gubash that concludes a cycle of projects that reach back nearly ten years and which began at Galerie UQO in 2015. Here, a monumental quantity of objects fills the centre of the gallery: a collection of interconnected sculptures accompanied by the script of a video imagining migrant workers who engineer a cynical end to our perpetual cycle of waste and consumption. This exhibition stems from a process of artistic exploration, as experienced by the artist himself in terms of work, material costs, the accumulation of objects, waste and the risk of failure inherent to creating art.

Here, seemingly disconnected yet curiously linked elements converge:

- news images of refugee camps in Europe;

- memories of the artist’s personal experience as an immigrant to Canada;

- a dream about a constructivist stage set thrown out at sea and washed ashore years later, then rebuilt differently;

- a do-it-yourself underground factory;

- floating islands of plastic garbage in the ocean;

- the link between the treatment of disposable objects and people (and human relationships);

- the back rooms of used goods sorting centres like Value Village.

Over the course of the exhibition, Galerie UQO transforms into a sorting facility for unwanted items and idle machinery, and the set for a play about a world of dying objects. A Disaster Zone in an Abandoned Theater Set considers the present leading into a highly problematic and uncertain future. Time’s effect on the work will surely clarify one of two possible outcomes: render both the installation and the artist’s approach as nostalgic and obsoleted itself, or perhaps impart to it a strangely prescient quality, warning of a poor future outcome where people are left to play with broken and useless things. Set on a raised platform, the complex and detailed sculptures congregate into forms that take on the appearance of monstrous characters in a theatre of objects. They interact with each other in varied and mysterious ways, and with the public as they breathe, kick, spin, and light up. Is the play within the installation about forms at war with one another, or is the last physical machine dreaming as it performs its final tricks and surprises for public amusement, before it finally expires?

In a kind of fantasy narrative, the video Yugoslavian Discount Value Chocolates features a group of thrift store employees who, every night, shuffle into a back room where they sort through donated goods. They cobble together machines and structures that wrap various obsolete objects with aluminum foil to make “fake chocolates” that are then resold, upending the production model that made them in the first place. In this intrigue, the workers are immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who have lived through a failed Socialist experiment, one with a planned economy that generated obsolete and often dysfunctional products. This experience left them with a savviness tinged with a subversive, entertaining, and prankster nature. After experiencing the painful transition to global capitalism, they are used to going to great lengths to transform anything that can be repackaged into profitable merchandise. This almost mythical premise, which acts as the foundation of the video and sculptural installation, presents a unique perspective on what constitutes valid forms of desire and transaction.

The objects in this exhibition truly speak to the impermanence of taste, of perpetually frustrated desire, and of personal and collective anxiety brought on by an economy built on obsolescence. By rejecting capitalism’s ideal of constantly stoking our desires, and by refusing to simply see this imagined archetype as a kind of desperate act, Milutin Gubash considers these references moments of abrupt, conscious, and active transition; subversions and transformations, implemented to facilitate other ways of living in the world.