In the weeks leading up to the Museum of Everyday Art, the artist/curator Jim Ricks will borrow a selection of objects local people collect, sell and keep. It is an exhibition that will be developed entirely while in Cork. By approaching persons, businesses, etc and asking to borrow something(s) for the exhibition, it is essentially a ‘residency’ that is collaborative, curatorial, research-based and well… fixated on the everyday conceptions of beauty. The exact results of this exhibition cannot be precisely calculated. The show will fill the gallery with a range of object/sculptures. It is entirely possible that many objects will be hand-made, nostalgic and kitsch and it is certain all of the things will not be considered art, as they will most likely be mass-produced and Ready-Made.
It is at once humourously critiquing the way we experience art; the way we see and know it, and it is simultaneously a serious extension of Ricks’ practice that hybridises institutional/ gallery and public/private roles into a single project. It blurs the distinctions between curator, audience, producer, collector, consumer, patron, etc. Essentially it is an art-historical and curatorial performance… It is at once a playful jab, an attempt to come to terms with the artist’s own uneasiness with the standards of the Artworld, a class-based look at what and who ‘makes’
something art, a critique of literacy and elitism, a post-conceptual populist exhibition that blurs the line between high and low, and a contrarian anti-art Museum. Issues of epistemology, ownership, permission, misrepresentation and audiences are fundamental as well. It will also be a conscious
nod to Dadaism, Duchamp, Triple Candie, Marcel Broodthaers’s museums, Jim Shaw’s collection of thrift store paintings, the work of Tom Marioni and the long and ‘proud’ history of institutional critique.