Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
Broker
October 22 - November 26, 2016
There are proven ways to help make you more successful as a marketer or a politician. Influencing others isn't luck or magic - it's science.
Postmasters Gallery presents BROKER, a solo exhibition by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The centerpiece of BROKER is the premiere of a 28 minute film of the same name, starring actress Gillian Chadsey. Set in a seventy-seventh floor apartment in one New York City's many Trump Towers, the film is a meticulously shot portrayal of a high end real estate broker, seen here as the physical embodiment of the constantly accelerating pitch of luxury merchandising. The film uses the architecture of the apartment to create an echo chamber of life style messages - messages which present an increasingly homogeneous (yet bespoke) utopian world for those with the means to buy it.Today we demonstrate ways to make people say yes to your messaging and your management. This is science - from scientific studies.
With songs and spoken dialog collaged from pop psychology marketing sites across the internet, the broker first celebrates and then becomes crushed by the perfect amenities of the perfect real estate she sells. The McCoys' film widens the formal terrain of contemporary moving image work, carving out space for a perverse form of the already ungainly genre of the "filmed musical." The film's songs and sounds have been composed by Lori Scacco, whose points of departure range from Robert Ashley's operas to ASMR to the sensation of singing into a fan. BROKER magnifies the logic of marketing, the surfaces of luxury, and the sound of electronic speech, creating a sound and image world just on the edge of plausible.People"s ability to understand the factors That affect their behavior is surprisingly poor.
One aspect of the apartment is that it is wired and surveilled. Extending from their previous work with miniatures and live cameras, the exhibition also includes "Five Sevenths" an installation which plays on the word "model apartment" by creating a slightly less than life size version of a model apartment for viewers to tour in the gallery. Sculpted from foam at 5/7" inch scale, the project imagines and records the viewer as apartment hunter, eternally wondering why the space isn't larger.The Postmasters exhibition will also premiere new glass sculptures made by casting trays of broken glassware as single objects. With titles denoting bland luxury appellations like Lauren and Breslin, these tautological pieces are artifacts from after the revolution, after the party ends, after the destruction of Barneys.
The works of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have been widely exhibited in the US and internationally - including shows at Museum of Modern Art in New York, British Film Institute-Southbank in London, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hannover Kunstverein and EMPAC Center at Rensselear Polytechnic in Albany. They have also presented work at the Beall Center in Irvine, CA, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, and most recently at 601 Artspace, NY. In 2011, they have received Guggenheim Fellowship.
