Artist Registry
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Side Sleeper Press Release, written by Jesse Firestone:
Gabryel explores themes of consumer culture, resale markets, the American Dream, and gender. The artist transforms vacuum-formed headboards and vanity mirrors popularized by Franco Cozzo, an Italian-Australian salesman whose bedroom sets were often given female names.
For Gabryel, these furniture pieces hold the promises of something other than themselves, i.e. a piece of plastic masquerading as a handmade marble sculpture. This reflects a crucial part of contemporary American consumer culture where simulation is better than the real thing.
By replicating design motifs associated with Art Nouveau and Italian Palazzos –which are related to bourgeois class status– into mass-produced objects, Cozzo sold what Gabryel refers to as “aspirational objects.” Gabryel sourced the discarded furniture through refuse in her neighborhood and resale markets such as Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. They are often found dirty and broken, but Gabryel sees them as holding a fading idealism, reflecting a cracked image of America when the suburban dream was flourishing.
Gabryel notes that the original smooth and monochromatic designs of the headboards reflect tropes of innocence, impressionability, and purity. The work features blooming flowers and over-exaggerated curves referencing visual metaphors for femininity. The artist transforms the objects by upholstering them with colored latex and steel tacks. Gabryel’s craftwork disrupts Cozzo’s original aesthetics enhancing and imbuing them with sexual energy and power. Select works are renamed after women the artist sees as having complex relationships around expectations and beauty standards.
Gabryel’s interventions change the ownership of these designs and question what it means for a man to sell architectural decor that effectively renders the bed as an object of femininity. The artist’s alterations liberate these objects from their original intent creating new possibilities and challenging the expectations embedded within these consumer products.