ALL CONSUMED

MAY 12 – JUNE 24, 2023

GARY EMRICH

Through a process of deconstruction, artist Gary Emrich highlights the imagery of pristine natural landscapes among the waste of non-reusable plastic water bottles. The resulting large-scale images of abstracted lush greenery, blue skies, and snow-capped mountains address the power of bottled water marketing, as well as spotlight the hypocrisy of consumer culture.

On average, Americans consume 50 billion bottles of water a year at 1000 times the cost of tap water. However, this bottled water culture is not unique to America. International water companies in places like Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, also portray these images of remote landscapes on their bottled water products, reinforcing the impact of branding on consumers as commodified water continues to be a worldwide necessity.

ABOUT THE PROCESS

To make these ideas real, I layer a hard, transparent plastic "blister-pack" with water bottle packaging on a light table, fill the plastic depressions with bottled water and photograph the composition with a view camera. I have chosen to combine two of the first things we throw away, inverting the value of the things consumers buy by preserving and elevating the disposable and ubiquitous packaging and plastics to make trash an object of desire and beauty.

Water as a commodity has been a subject in my art practice for over twenty years. Living in the high desert of the American West, my perspective on the value of water is shaped by watching water rights bought and sold and knowing that the geography of Colorado dictates that all the water eventually leaves and none flows back into the state.

ABOUT GARY

Gary Emrich is a Colorado-based artist with a 40-year exhibition record. His work resides in numerous private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the State of Colorado, and the University of Colorado Art Museum. His work investigates how people create personal memories and collective histories from the countless objects and impressions they accumulate on a daily basis, and why humans endow special meaning through preservation.

Emrich received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA degree in Political Science from the University of Colorado.