Energy Effects:

Art and Artifacts from the Landscape of Glorious Excess

Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts From the Landscape of Glorious Excess was a large-scale exhibition that explored the relationship between energy and aesthetic power. Expanding the definition of energy, this exhibition presented a variety of ways that creativity advocates energy expenditure.

The projects included in Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts from the Landscape of Glorious Excess are judged not by their usefulness but instead by aesthetic, political, cultural, and historical potential. They are less involved in the ethics of how energy should be used than in imagining the many ways in which it could be used. The new categories of energy include Terminal Energy, Rubbernecking Energy, Political Energy, and Blind Energy, among others. They may seem odd, but in connecting works of design, art, architecture, science, and industry, these terms teach us something important about energy. The combination of diverse objects from so many fields and the invention of new categorical identities link the profligate energy of creative life and the surplus energy of modern society.

This exhibition included artwork by Orly Genger (b. 1979, New York), Janine Gordon (b. 1966), Anne Hardy (b. 1970, United Kingdom), Pablo Helguera (b. 1971, Mexico City), Kcho (b. 1970, Cuba), Gonzalo Lebrija (b. 1972, Mexico City), Viviane Le Courtois (b. 1969, Lesneven, France), Richard Meredith-Hardy (b. 1957, United Kingdom), Martha Russo (b. 1962, Connecticut), Jim Sanborn (b. 1945, Washington D.C.), Ward Shelley (b. 1950, Auburn, New York), Steve Vaught (b. 1967, Youngstown, Ohio), Willard Wigan MBE (b. 1957, Birmingham, United Kingdom), Jeff Shore (b. 1969) and Jon Fisher (b. 1969), Don Stinson (b. 1956), Maximilien Brice, Ciro Najle, and Totolab / Raül Cárdenas.