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the EVERYTHING
MUST GO project is now gone as is CENTURY
PLAZA and General
Growth Properties
DEC 20 – JAN 3, 2009 CENTURY
PLAZA SHOPPING MALL
2nd Floor South-East Wing
One retail store leased in Century Plaza Shopping
Mall in Birmingham, Alabama is the site of EVERYTHING MUST GO,
a temporary exhibition space featuring the work of twenty young artists
from across the country. The exhibition will change each day over two
weeks to feature a different artist or collaborative group.
In
an American landscape full of abandoned malls, EVERYTHING
MUST GO is
an attempt, not to revitalize these structures, but to embrace the
playful fantasy that the empty mall offers as a social space.
Century Plaza Shopping Mall at the time of this exhibition
has less than 20 open stores and over 70 vacant stores. With a total
leasable area of 750,000 square feet, less than a fourth is being used.
Thousands of similar dead or dying malls can be found throughout America.
Meanwhile, new shopping centers continue to be developed, sprawling farther
and farther from city centers, where newer facades can be constructed
, spent, and discarded. The greater Birmingham area has at least 7 major
shopping centers, with
more on the way.
If the shopping center is the model around which our communities are
built, what does the abandoned mall say about our society? America currently
has more than four-thousand abandoned malls, more shopping centers than
high schools, and twenty square feet of retail space for every person.
T A K E T H E M A L L
We seek to re-claim these abandoned spaces--to
simultaneously draw attention to their existence and offer alternative
realities. EVERYTHING MUST GO confronts the fantasy of the mall as a
post-apocalyptic playground in the ruins of late-capitalism. This project
pays homage to the dual sense of alienation and ambition inherent in
the renegade communities so often depicted in horror movies, embraced
in basement rock shows, or imagined within the escapist games of our youth.
Artists featured in this exhibition utilize the theatrical
setting of the failed store to accentuate the void rather than filling
it.
Using the mall as a stage, these artists create situational works which
engage viewers using sound, sculpture, video, collage, installation,
and performance. The temporary nature of this exhibit offers a variety
of voices within limited means, but also creates an impermanent, shifting
dialogue. The project will be documented in a small series of publications
available onsite and through a website which will be updated daily throughout
the run of the exhibition.
EVERYTHING MUST GO is created and produced
by Rachel Higgins. Artists featured were selected from an open call to
the artist’s immediate community of friends and colleagues working in
New York, Philadelphia, and Birmingham. While proposals have been selected
based on relevancy of subject matter and a familiarity with the artists'
work, it is intended for the individual voice of each artist
to own the space for a day.
more here
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