Laveen Gammie

Through arrangement, Laveen Gammie’s CONTENT- AWARE makes visible the often unacknowledged labours and perils of contemporary cultural production—a myriad of symbology illuminates the misconceptions, promises and manipulations of world-making under capitalist conditions. In moving these balloons from the background to the centrepiece, Gammie interrogates their role in the construction of meaning and identity, as both balloons and the objects they represent. Keenly displayed on green-screen toned plinths, these interventions abstract the items’ significance through both incident and affect. Much like chroma keying, these balloons reinforce the kaleidoscopic and ever evolving nature of definition, that which can be reconstructed and undone.
As the helium attempts to rise to the top, capitalism taunts us to do the same. But like the balloons, we will find these efforts are unsustainable, reinforcing the pageantry of the free market to be nothing more. Considering patriarchal surveillance and intervention, Gammie’s work provides a space of reflection as we examine our own postcolonial relationships to these signs, and how they impact our lives. We may even be guided down a path of questioning:
What are the larger repercussions of the commodities we desire; how does cultural significance and exhibition alter the permanence and/or function of these products; how do we differentiate the art object from the consumerist good, and to what degree is this discernment necessary under capitalist?
(Text by Katrina Goetjen)