buy and sell* (*although of course you end up becoming yourself) creates a self-portrait of the artist through her ambivalent relationship with objects. In focusing on the poetics of these objects as they become obsolete, the work becomes both an alternative archive and personal memorial, while critiquing the role of the art market and highlighting the increasingly panoptic gaze of the internet.

Staged as an online EBay auction of her personal effects following her future death (all of which were available to bid on during the course of the exhibition), the work creates multiple sites of activation; both in the gallery space as an installation, on the internet as a functioning auction, within institutional frameworks through the incorporation of a company to oversee the sale and as a literary work through its publication as a book.  nicolawhelan.com 

Book and Exhibition Placards designed by Éna Brennan & Keelin Coyle

Exhibition