In a glass tank filled with fresh water, artist Alex Frost slowly opens consumer products, to strangely beautiful effect.
In 2020, an exhibition of videos and sculptures by her made from products that feed our ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle is coming to Firstsite (8 February – 19 April).
During summer 2018, Alex Frost uploaded 48 videos onto YouTube. These videos featured ready meals, snacks, protein shakes, vitamin tablets and energy drinks, all ‘on-the-go’ products, submerged and unpacked underwater. Frost called these films ‘Wet Unboxings’ – a nod to the online trend of ‘Unboxing’ where a product (usually a high-tech consumer item) is unpacked, explained and demonstrated, all of which is captured on video and uploaded to the Internet. Taken to extremes, unboxing can almost become an art form in itself.
Alex Frost’s ‘Wet Unboxings’ quickly went viral – featuring in dozens of articles online, finding their way onto Indonesian TV and being listed on the meme hall of fame Knowyourmeme.com. Their energising and optimizing product selection and meme-like circulation, seeks to capture the fluidity of life today where the virtual and the real are perpetually reordered.
The objects Frost “unboxes” reflect a life of transience. A whole tube of Berocca creates an entrancing fizzy orange cloud, cold brew coffee is dark and menacing, ready-made sandwiches slowly disintegrate, a tin of Del Monte fruit salad opens to reveal a balletic cascade of fruit lumps, billowing clouds of dry shampoo reflect life on the go. Gaviscon unleashes billowing fluffy pink clouds to settle the results of too many hasty meals.
Frost says “It feels as if every nanometre of space has been priced up and every second is rationed. I decided to do the unboxings underwater so they would be read as mesmerising or unsettling, rather than as an advert for the product.”
At Firstsite around twelve of these videos will be projected facing each other on opposite sides of the gallery on screens that stretch the entire width of the walls, immersing the viewer in the larger-than-life images.
The videos will be accompanied by a series of wall-based sculptures made from sandwiches and frozen pizzas encased in resin —foods that are part of the same optimised on-the-go lifestyle that the videos try to capture. Frost calls these works ‘captures’ rather than ‘pictures’, the idea of ossifying functional foods in resin gives them a permanence that is contrary to their original purpose. They are preserved rather than depicted.
Firstsite Director Sally Shaw says, “Alex Frost’s reflections on modern life, consumerism and the transience of our day to day existence are incredibly apt right now. In Firstsite’s year of digital and wellbeing, between this exhibition and Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Isles, there’s a conversation about mass society and our understanding of community and consumerism. These works encourage us to examine how our lives and our environment have been influenced by digital technology – making visible the effects of our throw-away culture and the impact this is ultimately having on our world.”
