Review: Brian Ulrich: Copia—Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001–2011

Abstract

HAGGERTY MUSEUM OF ART AT MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN JANUARY 22--MAY 18, 2014 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Brian Ulrich's retrospective exhibition Copia--Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001-2011 offers a nuanced portrayal of American consumer culture in large-format photographs of shoppers, goods, and commercial spaces. The pictures resound with wit, artifacts of desire and disenfranchisement, and no small amount of fear. After all, Copia (Latin for plenty) began as an investigation of consumer behavior in the economic turmoil following 9/11, and continued through collapses in the housing, real estate, and financial markets over the ensuing decade. Viewed as a whole, the project offers a sustained exploration and critique of consumerism deeply invested in its historical moment, with all of the desperation and hope this entails. This context helps to explain the curious mixture of abundance and bewilderment seen in Copia's first phase, Retail (2001-06). Here, the forces driving consumer behavior put pressure on individuals who try to make considered choices; shoppers are set adrift in massive retail structures, lost in a morass of products, hovering between promise and fulfillment. Visual patterns that emerge in the arrangement of goods, or in the play of perspective and blocks of color (as seen in Granger, IN from 2003), tend to reinforce the historical connection between consumer habits and the flow of commodities. But if replication suggests predictability, the overall tone of Retail's imagery still reverberates with the perplexity of desire--consumers stand transfixed under banks of fluorescent light, inundated by displays of televisions or stuffed toys or guns or pharmaceuticals, and negotiate great arrays of cashiers that recede into distant horizons. Despite the relative anonymity of Retail's subjects, their predicaments strike a familiar note. The large format and rich atmospheres of the prints further promote an empathetic kind of spectatorship--a self-recognition by which we are urged to contemplate (and critique) our own role in consumer culture. This is deftly contextualized with a tacit acknowledgement of the absurdity of our experience amid such a vast abundance of commodities. Scale and pattern convey this at a glance, but it is drawn out equally well through the expressive qualities of people and objects. A blank Homeland Security Threat Level sign in Black River Falls, WI (2006) instructs customers to Please see cashier for details, while in Cleveland, OH (2003), a stuffed Eeyore in a Disney display seems to gaze sympathetically at a child wandering about before a multitude of Minnies, Tiggers, and Poohs. Where the Retail phase tracked consumer patterns, Thrift (2005-08) followed the goods, donated in bulk to thrift stores as people made room for more recent acquisitions. …