Blue Chip Opportunities
14th March - 18th April
Plomacy is pleased to present Blue Chip Opportunities, a new installation by Auckland-based artist Mark Schroder.
Schroder’s new work continues his longstanding interest in the visual and rhetorical qualities embedded in commercial structures. Installed in a 20sqm gallery space often mistaken for a carpark, Blue Chip Opportunities takes the form of a surreal property development layout: a miniature landscape assembled from hand-pinched clay terrain and ceramic houses. The environment is punctuated by fragments of corporate signage and promotional language, alongside pieces of carpet, office furniture, and other everyday commercial materials.
The banal motifs of commerce like corporate language, carpet, and paperwork form a charged environment and surreal environment. Property as a system of speculation butting up against how we imagine and occupy the spaces we live and work in.
A miniature landscape of hand-pinched clay terrain and ceramic houses is interspersed with fragments of corporate signage, promotional language, carpet, office furniture, and other commercial materials. Corporate posters appear slightly misaligned, their tone rendered faintly acrid. On the walls, corporate-branded jerseys sit alongside drawings made in highlighter and ballpoint: a building aflame, thick case files framed as objects.
Blue Chip Opportunities brings together the familiar textures in an absurdist way to reflect on the systems of language, promotion, and investment that shape contemporary property culture.
Mark Schroder (b. 1980, Auckland) lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He holds an MFA from Auckland University of Technology (2015). Schroder’s practice constructs montage-like environments that draw on the aspirational and disappointing qualities of finance, commerce, and speculation.