Of Decadence and Decay

Curated by Marley C. Smit

Artists: Hilliary Gabryel, Christina Nicodema, Kat Ryals, Rachael Tarravechia

April 2021 

Of Decadence and Decay is a group exhibition of works that employ craft, kitsch and camp to reveal the innately grotesque nature of amassing extreme wealth and all its trappings in the era of late capitalism. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the morbid effects of class disparity in America perpetuated by colonial, capitalist, racist and patriarchal systems. Although capitalism tends to suck everything up into its vortex, even efforts to undermine it, Of Decadence and Decay leans into this contradiction, while asking how craft and kitsch art can undermine classist hierarchies and illuminate pathways towards more ethical models of valuation. By remaining complicit in the capitalist mechanism that elevates anything canonized as “fine art” to an exalted status, the exhibition brings together works by Hilliary Gabryel, Christina Nicodema, Kat Ryals and Rachael Tarravechia that together contribute to kitsch and craft art’s history of undercutting the socially constructed disparities between “high” and “low” material, inviting inquiry into other normalized oppressive systems of determining value.