Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Planned Obsolescence for NADA MIAMI 2023, a solo booth by American painter Scott Young modeled on the cultural power of the commercial shopping center. Still lives of romantic and fetishistic objects juxtapose imagery from the 1980s soap opera Dynasty on Young’s finely rendered surfaces, to summon a central aura of aspiration that commodification of goods and images throughout the 20th Century inspired.
Dynasty in the 1980s became an iconic emblem of style and elegance that the suburban American public would seek to distill through purchasing jackets with shoulder pads and luminous shoes at shopping malls.
For Young, the shopping center, postwar suburban domesticity, and our current age of digital E-commerce and social media share a similar matrix of infinity: Marx, Walter Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Guy Debord all articulated potential effects of the commodity fetish becoming engrained within consumer psychology.Yet Young’s philosophy transcends theory, toward ideas about an architecture of the mind where repression and hope find endless, dramatic release, a sensation here magnified with the installation of wallpaper depicting a mall fountain.
Originally conceived in America by Victor Gruen as a version of the Italian galleria for modernity, the shopping mall becomes for Young, like Dynasty, a vessel for emotional illusions. His representations of vanilla marble running with golden veins and of walnut panel freshly varnished correspondingly mirror the structures of television media cabinets, which frame the dreamlike voids their screens illustrate.