Gabriel Kuri

Untitled (superama)

2003

Mexico City native Gabriel Kuri often takes a witty, conceptual approach to social commentary through language and objects drawn from his culture. Using individual experience as a point of departure, Kuri highlights fragments of daily life through the displacement of objects and ideas.

In Untitled (superama), the artist has had a receipt from a trip to a Mexican Wal-Mart transformed into an exquisite hand-loomed Gobelin, a type of tapestry. The notion of consumerism and its relationship with art is something that weighs heavily in this piece.

What we would normally consider trash is elevated to fine art in the hands of world-renowned tapestry weavers in Guadalajara, Mexico, who translate the pixilated print of the enlarged printed receipt into individual knots tied by hand. By choosing to reproduce a receipt from Wal-Mart, one of the world’s largest and most controversial commercial retailers, Kuri forces us to reexamine and reorganize the role of consumerism in the art world.

The large scale of the tapestry allows the viewer to study an object that in most cases would be considered trash. The items featured on the receipt are not particularly noteworthy—tuna, Cheetos, lightbulbs—and yet the receipt gains a certain significance due to its considerable size. By enlarging the receipt, Kuri effectively comments on the perceived importance and preciousness of art by monumentalizing an inherently ephemeral piece of paper.

The result is a typically mundane item removed from its ordinary context, which in the process is transformed into something admirable, even beautiful.