Vanitas: people will pay anyway

Patrick Chen

Vanitas: people will pay anyway

Bronze on butter
30 x 30 x 30 cm
$3000

Unlike the vanitas works it echoes, this skull is not about the passage of time. Butter, a domestic staple, has become a luxury in Aotearoa New Zealand, priced for global markets by an industry that has always taken more than it was given. The bronze casting makes that permanent: a perishable necessity, fixed forever, useless as food. The gallery shelf elevates the symbolic value of what a supermarket has already made political. Nothing about the work is neutral, including the viewer. The price stays the same. The skull keeps melting.

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Artworks currently on exhibition can be collected from the gallery at 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000 once the exhibition has concluded. Collection is available during gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 12–7pm, and Saturday, 12–4pm.

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