July 2018 at GRAFT Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico

A two-day immersive bootleg museum experience with performances. Created in collaboration with So This Is Art, Rob Stevens, Lance McGoldrick, Ren Adams, Natalie Day, Drew Miller, Piera Turkis, Bradford Erickson, Stanley Brapola, CB Bryan, Noel Mollinedo, Apollo Gomez, Lee Frampton, and more.

Shitty Infinity is a project exploring our contemporary relationship to the celebrity culture which surrounds artists and museum institutions. Our contemporary art culture prizes a cult of personality which imbues artworks with the mystique of the famed creator. Museums of the major cultural metropolis of the United States compete to collect every character from a short cast list (a Kusama, a Koons, a Turrell), resulting in the mass-production of series, or in exhibition contexts which subvert individual experience of time-based, ephemeral, or immersive works. Voyeurism and viewership within public spaces take on special meaning in the hyper-regulated encounter with the famous work. Works designed to provide visitors with immersive experiences of the transcendent, the infinite, and the sublime, are disrupted and even sabotaged by the commodified contexts within which we access them.

Can you experience infinity in less than one minute? Can you afford the entry fee? 

Shitty Infinity as an installation questions the social value placed on direct experience of mega-star artworks within the context of major museums. The museum functions as a site of pilgrimage, a playground, a backdrop for the documentation of experience. The social capital attached to these encounters with the fetishized and mythic artworks reinforces a hierarchy of value around cultural production, situating the weight of that capital within a handful of major cities and institutions. 

Shitty Infinity is our private collection of off-brand and homemade reproductions of some of the most highly prized historic and contemporary works in our society. Through these irreverent replicas, we seek to create an experience of the museum which flips our hierarchies of celebrity worship and instead centers the handmade, the humorous, the personal, and the truly bizarre.