This monograph dedicated to sculptor Genesis Belanger looks back at the beginnings of her practice and offers an analysis of her work.
The book begins with an essay by curator Amy Smith-Stuart, which introduces Genesis Belanger's work and how it deals with the topic of gender. A second essay, by curator Leigh Arnold, explores how the artist, influenced by her experience in advertising, uses beauty and desire to initiate a dialogue with the viewer. A third essay is by
Éric Troncy, the co-director of the Consortium Museum in Dijon.
Genesis Belanger (born 1978 in the USA) stages psychologically charged mise-en-scènes composed of idiosyncratic versions of everyday objects. Working in a multitude of handcrafts—welder, ceramicist, and seamstress—Belanger conjures installations of unresolved tension on the edge of a temporal collapse. Her vocabulary is lifted from the 1950s, specifically from the dawn of American advertising, and she infuses her tableaux with a sense of lobotomized capitalist productivity, choosing liminal spaces, such hotel lobbies or office waiting rooms, as subject-matter. In Belanger's practice, the body is absent, inviting the viewer to enter as purposeful actor. In her immersive scenes, objects become surrogate for the female body: pursed lips emerge from matching stoneware lamps, fingers sprout from a bouquet, and a hot dog wiggles itself into a wedge heel. Belanger's three-dimensional work, although situated within the legacy of Claes Oldenburg and Robert Gober, is principally concerned with the manifestation of capitalist myths on a gendered psyche. In 2021, Genesis Belanger was the subject of a solo exhibition at the
Consortium in Dijon, France. In 2020, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut dedicated a solo exhibition to her work. In 2019, Belanger created an installation in the New Museum's Storefront Window, New York.