Still lives

Object 2: The alienated object

In Affordable dreams Diana Shores presents a work which is simultaneously an object and not an object, to explore notions of alienation in contemporary society. The work consists of many paper tags, like the ones attached to designer clothing. She presents these attached directly to the galley wall, spaced every ten centimetres with simulated randomness to cover a surface area of several square metres. Shore's object is the tags, but by their allusion to the missing objects to which the tags surely should have been attached, she has created a non-object, or invisible object. Like a phantom limb, the tags are an acute reminder to the viewer of an absence, a lack, a sense of alienation.

The tags have been made by the artist from digital prints, taken from stills of David Fincher's Fight Club. They are over-printed with what at first appear to be symbols of an unfamiliar code, but on further reading become symbols taken from the labels of clothing, text and dollar symbols. Removed from their original contexts and cues, and presented as single visual elements or repeated as pattern, although familiar, the symbols too become alienated units in a code, the key to which is not accessible.

The tags, with their absent presence and unreadable codes, make reference to the complex relationship between consumer and desired object enacted during the retail purchase. What exactly is being bought in such a transaction: object as fulfiller of concrete function, or object as reflection of identity, real or imagined? Or object as trace of authentic experience, a reiteration of one's existence. In the world of Shore's affordable dreams, it is the tag, or the idea of the object, rather than the physical presence of form, that will ultimately triumph.

• Al Munro
• From the catalogue essay Of lives and objects still
• March 2004

• Diana Shores
• Affordable dreams (detail)2004
• Digital prints, string, cardboard

• Diana Shores
• Affordable dreams 2004
• Digital prints, string, cardboard

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