Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
Jan 19 - Mar 3, 2024

Byproduct Studios show statement:
Our collaborative artwork focuses on the use of excess materials from our daily lives, artistic practices, and surrounding natural and built environments to create “semi functional” artwork that recalls domestic objects like tableware, and furniture, or references to the architectural spaces that we inhabit.  We enjoy contrasting these rigid surfaces and often traditional forms with bodily-like materials that are, or appear to be, soft and malleable; materials that seem to or at one point did slump, stretch, flow, drip and squish. These qualities are shared with the human body and lend an organic or biological character to the work. The resulting creations are chaotic, joyful, and curious. 

We relocated to Cincinnati in the summer of 2022, and the process of moving forced us to consider the power of our objects, which seemed as though they had ownership over us. As we considered what to keep and what to throw away, we experienced feelings of responsibility, affection, dislike, and guilt, both in regard to the objects themselves and our roles as their caretakers.  These emotions manifest in the work as a critical examination of the economic and sentimental value of heirlooms, children’s possessions, and disused-but-functional furniture.  Some of the work also functions as a cenotaph for objects we ultimately parted ways with.

The time spent transforming our first home and now our new home is also reflected in the work. Physical features of the home are incorporated into installations and artworks by utilizing original materials and measurements or evoking architectural features to generate an uncanny sense of domesticity and familiarity. Smaller sculptures and assemblages placed upon larger surfaces are a playful interpretation of activity that would happen in the domestic space which call attention to the value of daily rituals.

photographs by Sven Kahns https://www.svenkahns.com/