Stuart Lantry: What Comes Around, Goes Round and Round
December 1, 2023 - January 28, 2024
First Friday Opening Reception: Dec 1 from 6:00-9:00 pm
Practice Gallery is pleased to present What Comes Around, Goes Round and Round, an installation by Philadelphia-based artist Stuart Lantry. The installation centers around a giant, miniature Ferris wheel, slowly rotating a series of sculpted surrealist objects that attempt to catalogue and distill… everything. A Ferris wheel as a cyclical, subjective encyclopedia. The exhibition will run from December 1, 2023 through January 28, 2024, with an opening reception for the artist during First Fridays on December 1 from 6:00-9:00 pm.
Artist's Statement:
The first Ferris Wheel emerged from the Great Exhibitions of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Born from international competition with the intention to highlight the potential of industrial capitalism, the first Great Exhibition took place in London. France followed up by projecting its industrial sophistication into the sky with the Eiffel Tower, which invited visitors to climb the world’s tallest structure at the time. The United States, hoping to take its place on the world stage, hosted a subsequent World’s Fair in Chicago. After a competition focused on attempting to “out Eiffel, Eiffel,” George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. engineered the Ferris wheel for the United States in response. The fair meant to unify concepts of American exceptionalism and industrial power, with the Ferris wheel spinning as the central hub and attraction of the entire fair. A continuously revolving monument to 20th century notions of progress, constantly spinning while going nowhere.
At present, it can often feel like all of our global society is locked into a sequence of events. The sequence is not born of our own making, nor is it one that we chose. Like being forcibly strapped into a roller coaster as it is ascending to the apex, well past point of no return. Despite objecting to the direction we appear to be heading in, we cannot help but contribute slightly to the gravitational inevitability of the upcoming plunge. A cycle of global consumption that inevitably leads to climate change, wealth inequality, injustice, dehumanization of workers, animal abuse, etc. But Amazon is just so easy to order from.
In this precarious moment, wars, both real and cultural, seem to cycle like fashion trends. All at the speed of the internet, an endless ouroboros of content, doom-scrolling through your algorithmically tailored FYP. Everything teeters in a state of non-equilibrium, constantly changing, yet going nowhere in particular. A giant wheel, spinning just for the sake of spinning.
Situated somewhere between Fischli and Weiss’ Suddenly this Overview, an encyclopedia of human experience sculpted in unfired clay and the everything bagel at the center of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, this Ferris wheel slowly spins a group of 12 absurdist sculptures that function as a synecdoche of everything. The human experience condensed onto an 8 foot tall Ferris wheel. Objects range from a balloon wearing a graduation cap, to a hand crawling out of a boxing glove, from a broom that has bristles made from human hair, to a cartoon bomb with a match taped to its side. Additional objects stand on pedestals, seemingly waiting for their turn on the Ferris wheel, a continuously looping attraction we cannot help but ride.
Artist's bio
Stuart Lantry (b.1990) makes installations, sculptures, videos and drawings that offer absurd meditations on how we create meaning from the routines of our everyday life. Raised in Los Angeles, Lantry received his MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and his BA magna cum laude with High Honors in Studio Art from Dartmouth College in 2012. His work has been shown across the U.S. with exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Providence and New Hampshire. Stuart currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.