A few years ago, the English artist Jesse Darling was standing in the vegetable aisle of a grocery store when he had a kind of epiphany.
Staring at plastic-wrapped produce, he suddenly felt an acute awareness of the path the items had taken to get there: from cultivation to processing, to packaging and shipment, and then to their place on the shelves.
“I just stood there transfixed on the spot,” he recalled in a video posted last year.
“I had this overwhelming sense of how fragile and precarious and preposterous it was: utterly in excess of requirement and in excess of possibility.”Darling hopes to provoke such revelations among viewers of his works, which include sculptures and installations of manipulated found objects.
He wants to expose the “fairy tale” of “the nation-state, the apparatus of capitalism, the structure of modernity, and race and gender,” he said in a recent interview — like “when someone is wearing an invisibility cloak and someone throws paint or talcum powder on it and it suddenly comes into view.”
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