Genesis Belanger makes surreal magic of everyday items. Her ceramic and mixed-media installations, created at her Brooklyn studio, reimagine household or natural objects, underpinned by an unsettling play between attraction and disgust. ‘I try to hover in this repulsive, seductive state,’ the artist tells me, when we speak ahead of her solo show, ‘In the Right Conditions We Are Indistinguishable’, opening at Pace, London.
Husband Material is a sculptural shopping bag of groceries that appears frozen mid-collapse. An open packet of biscuits teeters out the right-hand side, as the bag flaps at the front. If this movement were to continue, the bag and its contents would tumble clumsily to the floor. Cause and Effect features a hoover expressively consuming a length of rug. In Family Portrait, a domestic cupboard is filled with various bottles, topped by a fresh sandwich.
‘I think fridges and medicine cabinets are like portraits,’ says Belanger. ‘They’re a way of placing the owner in a time, place and context without ever seeing them. You can tell a whole story through this domestic lens.’ While human forms are usually absent, many of the artist’s sculptures suggest personality and lifestyle simply through the objects depicted.
For this exhibition, Belanger has considered the importance of context in shaping who we are. This is inspired in a broader sense by the state changes of substances depending on their surroundings; water converts to steam in a hot environment, for example. She has applied this idea to people, exploring how sociopolitical or domestic environments might impact individuals, especially in light of current polarisation around the US election.
These ideas feed into the show in an abstract way. The work itself becomes slippery, its various symbols and icons taking on different meanings depending on the setting of the work. A recurring red dot might at different points be read as a cherry or a bead. ‘Each time you see a shape or form, its meaning might shift,’ the artist tells me. ‘The object might be the same, but the scale has changed.’
Belenger’s process also encourages multiple readings. Her pieces are meticulously rendered, categorising them as fine art objects, but they mimic the appearance of cheap imitations, reflecting on the artist’s previous experience as a prop-styling assistant. She combines a range of materials with ceramics, chosen for their engineering and narrative potential; the hoover bag in Cause and Effect is made from men’s suit fabric. Belanger works hard to make these consistent with the look of the ceramics, throwing the viewer off when they finally notice a different material.
The works also slip between dimensions. She notes that while the works are real objects, photographs of them have been read as AI-generated. ‘They have a 3D-modelled look to them which I think is really cool,’ she says. ‘How to make something appear fake; in this [case], we’ve understood things to be fake, when they are actually real.’
The idea of nature runs through the show, in a domesticated, controlled form. Belanger wanted to evoke the idea of nature as a backdrop, something we experience but rarely fully engage with. She notes how nature itself has shifted through art history, with a painting of a flower inspiring a sculpture and so on. ‘Each time it becomes an inspiration of the inspiration instead of the real thing. I think this is how we all, especially those of us who live in the city, experience nature. At degrees of separation.’
Belanger turned her hand to painting for a year prior to this show. Those pieces have inspired the saturated colour palette at Pace and fed into Bit Eden, a 7ft tile relief. This work features bright, blooming flowers and vines set against a uniform grid with a retro digital aesthetic. ‘It’s as if Super Mario Bros. 2 had a level that was based on the Garden of Eden,’ she laughs. ‘It’s the first time I’ve made something relatively two-dimensional that to me feels as expansive as the sculptures.’ Together, her pieces place the viewer in a giant doll house, neither entirely real nor completely fake, relying on their own context and projections to try and make sense of it.
Genesis Belanger's exhibition ‘In the Right Conditions We Are Indistinguishable’ is at Pace, London until 9 November 2024
