I liked the theme of the gallery about order, the transience of things and how that relates to artworks. I wasn’t sure about this one initially, although it didn’t annoy me like some of the other exhibits, but I rather like it now. It’s by Marek Kvetan and the display reads:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marek Kvetan collected food wrappers and turned them into white plaster casts. The result is a silent scene of an emptied city that bears traces of personal and collective experience. Each cast is a frozen moment of the everyday – a memory that brought us together.”
The exhibit feels minimalist until there’s a thought about how much a discarded wrapper or container can say about a moment in time. The snack taken between Zoom calls or the packaging from a food delivery. With them in white plaster, there’s now no branding, colour or context other than the shape, so it feels almost like an archaeological residue. And it brings up the question of whether we needed all that packaging, as well as it being something of a shared universality.
I often overthink these things, but I liked the quiet understatement here.