Stavanger, Norway
Pokemon cards, candy wrappers, lip balm, disposable cutlery, house keys, and so on and so forth—the 906 bits and pieces that comprise Katharina Bjelland’s “Laundered Objects” are painfully familiar to me. I have kids and a spouse, and we live a middle-class existence in which we do a lot of laundry, buy a lot of cheap crap, and have far more stuff than we really need. Bjelland collects this detritus, most of which nobody will ever miss, and clips it to drying lines in the gallery. Here it appears orderly, almost anthropological, but also like a clever pop-up shop design. Nearby stands her 200-cm tall “Scrub Daddy,” named for the yellow smiley-face sponge it monumentalizes. There’s a Scrub Mommy product, too, but the popular one is Daddy, as if some cute marketing ploy could solve centuries of unequal domestic labor. All of this is really quite funny until you trip over the very thin line that Bjelland draws—using tactics of scale, repetition, and recollection—between humor and horror. This is our lives.
—Lori Waxman, March 18, 1:04 PM