Gucci Forever

  • by Miles Warner
  • Main Gallery: September 16 – December 10

Gucci Forever features an unlikely assortment of objects and stories, both miraculous and monumentally mundane, that showcase a contemporary quest for timelessness and the fountain of youth. Gucci Forever exhibits the multidimensional nature of timelessness and documents the infinite quest for an indefinable quality simply known as cool.

Through his persona, Chad Bentley, Miles Warner uses humor and satire to examine the phenomenon of celebrity. Through objects, video, and performance, the installation ponders the “absurd nature of the upper echelon.”

“This idea of an eternal sort of stance you can take in contemporary America by playing things right at the right time was really interesting to me,” Warner said at the artist talk and opening reception for Gucci Forever on September 20. “I liked the idea of working with that as an aesthetic of what a stock actually looked like.

“It turned into a keepsake, a physical keepsake of the exhibition,” he added, explaining that visitors are invited to take a “stock” from the exhibition.

Gucci Forever features a shimmering array of deconstructed trophies, baseballs, neon strip lights, along with video works utilizing the gallery’s window projections.

Visible from both inside and outside the gallery, videos from the exhibition sparked conversations amongst visitors to the gallery and passersby. The videos were part of the gallery’s Open-Air Projection to Initiate Conversation project.
 

Artist’s statement: Commonly used, fashionable formulas are employed to detail an unattainable lifestyle valued by our society as one of the highest degrees of success. The existence of Chad Bentley is to serve as the cover story that critiques a generation consumed by parasocial relationships and a vicarious lifestyle. The spectacle of the new American Royalty, and its enamoring characteristics, are condensed into objects and performances that allow for a closer examination of our contemporary values. The details and polished edges that make up Chad Bentley reference a world that prefers the sign over the signified. Caught between being appalled by its absurdity and lost in its decadence, I use this facade to critique both the upper echelon and those who ceaselessly perpetuate the illusion of the new American Dream.

Miles Warner holds a BFA from Keene State College and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has recently exhibited his work in Flashing The Leather at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center and in Relentless Melt at LaunchF18 in New York City.