Domestic Haze II
Mixed media installation, 2025
Städtische Ausstellung im Lagerhaus, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Hot glue and glitter, materials that are somewhere between artificial and natural, precious and cheap - the artist collective U5 builds and crafts, repurposes, reinvents. Standards are taken to absurd extremes, new worlds are designed. In these worlds, power relations are reversed, interactions and cycles are more important than monumentality. Under the exhibition title Domestic Haze, the collective presents works from the past 15 years.
Seven ghostly creatures play with female clichés as well as the uncanny. They break with normativity and stand for self-empowerment. The characters' clothes seem like reflections of other states of consciousness. Patterns and colors blur, shimmer, and flicker. The patterns are designed by U5 and are based on scans and photographs of smoke and fire, clear plastic film, or oil puddles, transferred and layered several times.
U5 uses these fabrics to tailor gown-like costumes with long, narrow sleeves, adorned with fringes, cords, and feathers. The masks hanging above them feature lush synthetic hair. U5 refer to the writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), who rewrites human history in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”: It was not the spear that marked the beginning, but the carrier bag; not hunting, but gathering; not aggressive techniques, but grounded, sustainable action. From this, Le Guin derives a vision of a cyclical way of life that is not geared towards permanent expansion.
This approach also shapes the work of U5. U5 pays attention to overlooked things and everyday products that are in constant use but receive little attention. They usually pass through our hands and end up in the trash without a second thought. U5 mixes these materials, fuses them, layers them on top of each other, tears them apart, and reassembles them. Through continuous processing and appropriation, these things are brought to life. Because only when things are capable of evoking emotions connections between people and things can be created. The resulting works are repeatedly recombined, repurposed, repaired, collaged, and assembled. In exhibitions, they take on different states and properties. Cotton swabs, for example, are suitable as miniature building materials, as surface decorations, as porous skin. And they can be transferred to other materials and enlarged as desired. Cotton swabs and ceramic tablet blisters lie on glass shelves next to a set of bean teeth, vases stand next to fake fried eggs, and medicine capsules - also made of ceramic - are neighbors to small, fantastical interiors and exteriors.
Domestic Haze was shown in September 2025 as part of the City of St. Gallen's artist grant at the Städtische Ausstellung im Lagerhaus.
