Ghislaine Leung

58: 96 / 49, Plastic, aluminum tape, dye, glue, children’s playhouse, metal, dimensions and title variable, Tape at minimum ceiling height for country of exhibition 2018

public sculpture, 2018

AR An interest in regulatory norms and their aesthetics is something we seem to share. On that note, I wonder if we might shift gears slightly and discuss the use of mass-produced children’s toys in your work. For instance, you’ve incorporated playhouses in _ : _ / _, (2018) and toy-like reproductions of actual home appliances in Public Sculpture (2018). The toys themselves evoke several references. On the one hand, they remind me of Levittown, where the Cape Cod-style home was mass-produced as a commercial object for GIs returning from World War II, carrying all sorts of ideological baggage around the white, American nuclear family. But I’m also thinking of artists who’ve intervened in this prefabricated landscape, like Dan Graham’s Alteration to a Suburban House (1978). In your work, there’s a specificity to each of these seemingly innocuous toys in that they serve as ideological dress rehearsals for children. Do you see them as a kind of ideology critique?

GLSure, _ : _ / _, (2018) is very much dealing with that. I’ve never used that term, but I suppose it’s less about pointing and more about exploring how supposedly neutral forms contain all sorts of assumptions and how we’re implicated within such standards and scales. So, _ : _ / _, is again context-contingent. Metal tape is installed across all the walls at the standard minimum ceiling height of a location alongside a children’s playhouse also purchased from that location. The title, blank here, is generated from those standards plus the standard hang height for an artwork in this location, for instance, 155 : 230 / 109. I’m interested in how we understand these standards as neutral when they are of course highly specific, from the design of both exhibition and domestic spaces to the playhouse’s incorporation of a flag holder or the color of the plastic. Neoliberalism is often viewed as neutral because it’s understood to be determined by the force of the market. Its ideology is not acknowledged. This frames the entire way we understand these neutralities and the way they can perpetuate violences.