Matthew Eskuche in Review: Fast Food Aesthetics

In his Toronto exhibition “Dollar Menu: A Fast Food Aesthetic,” the Pittsburgh-based glass artist Matthew Eskuche elevates glasswork—a medium traditionally considered as craft—to a form of high art and, while he is at it, also raises the vestiges of consumerism into prized, highly coveted objects. The series is a collection of fast food facsimiles—some of the detritus is intact, some is crushed or shattered, some spills out of garbage cans and some is clustered on and around antique tables and vanities. Comparisons to pop art are inevitable; the work is reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, for both in that work and in this one, the celebration and criticism of commercial culture is given new weight by grim contemporary consequences of rampant capitalism, globalization, consumption, waste, pollution and climate change.

In 99 Billion Served, a Baroque table is cluttered with what appears at first glance to be simple garbage. The colourful objects, whether pizza boxes, soda bottles, cardboard containers, stem glasses or ashtrays, however, are all handmade. They are nearly identical replicas of their referents, right down to their familiar logos: McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Marlboro. The distinctions between high and low culture, permanence and impermanence, collapse; disposable objects, normally produced in plastic, are recreated in the same glass as those that are meant to be reusable.

In The Whitewashing of Corporate Greed, trash overflows from an overturned garbage can. The objects are painted an anonymous, opaque white, removing all sense of corporate identity through an erasure of commercial logos and recognizable colour schemes. In Aristicrap II, the objects arranged on and under an ornate table are also anonymous but have been painted silver, connoting preciousness and expensiveness.

Warhol created his Brillo Boxes through commercial silkscreening to parallel methods of mass production involved in creating consumer items. In contrast, Eskuche’s objects are meticulously handmade from glass, paper, ink and paint along with some found elements. His painstaking attention to detail and slow and deliberate process of creation are diametrically opposed to the convenience of fast food and the rapid churning out of countless identical items.

The stillness of these three-dimensional works is incompatible with assembly-line haste, and the sales value of these artworks also diverges considerably from the cheap “dollar store” menu of items parodied. Through this recontextualization of familiar everyday objects, Eskuche offers simulacra that emphasize the dialectics at play in his work. They range from costs and consequences to transience and intransience, use and disuse, function and non-function, playfulness and criticism, humour and gravity. (55 Mill St Bldg 32, Toronto ON)