found/found

The objet trouvé, or found art object, has been a staple of modern art since Pablo Picasso pasted an already printed image of chair caning onto a painting in 1912. When Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in a New York art exhibition in 1917, titling it Fountain, the cat was out of the bag, and art acquired a whole new set of concerns. From Dadaist collagists to Jeff Koons, artists have repeatedly explored and reinvented concepts of found art over the past hundred years.

We spend our lives surrounded by objects: acquiring them, using them, and then casting them away. Separating objects from their original functions and placing them in an art gallery context can potentially generate new meanings that are both aesthetically and metaphorically interesting.

In this exhibition, seven artists play with and explore the tradition of found art, attempting to answer the question: How does an everyday object (already considered useless enough to throw away) derive a new identity as an art object? Whether simply taken into the gallery without alteration, altered slightly, or altered more radically, these works have a common origin: they were discarded, then found. The artists attempt to give these objects new life, perhaps enabling us to find them again in a different way.

Artists:
Robert Burleigh (Burleigh Kronquist)
Tom Edwards
Richard Joanisse
Jenny Roberts
Janet Tyson
Annie Wassmann
Margaret Willey