MICHAEL MACGARRY | The Long Run

"I am reliably informed that to survive in the art world as an artist, it is best to cultivate two essential traits: an unyielding commitment to self-importance, and the ability to write about their own work as if explaining a complicated illness to a bored insurance assessor. In opposition, this text—and its accompanying exhibition—are not a shout but rather a form of resistance to these imperatives – a sustained, low hum on the anxieties and elegant absurdities of contemporary life. The Long Run continues a conversation I have been having with myself for years—one centred on labour, value, and decay, occasionally interrupted by the need to make something tangible. For in the long run—as the economist John Maynard Keynes once noted—we are all dead. My modest hope is that, in the meantime, these works might make visible some of the structures we inhabit, and perhaps—though this may be asking too much—encourage us to imagine inhabiting them differently. The Long Run isn’t about resolution, it’s about accumulation—of meaning, of risk, of the quiet violence embedded in economic systems. It’s about the tension between survival and collapse. And ultimately, it’s about what it means to live with—and within—structures that promise prosperity but are built on exclusion. All paired with the pursuit of a purpose for living, greater than material accumulation.

The Long Run gathers a selection of new works from my ongoing Tontine series, accompanied by sculptures in polyurethane, steel and found objects. A tontine, for those who haven't had the pleasure of contemplating its bizarre logic, is a 17th-century financial scheme where participants contribute to a fund and then proceed to receive payouts until only one person is left standing, literally. To me, it serves as a grotesque metaphor for the current global economic game—a zero-sum death match disguised as mutual prosperity – paired with the absurd, yet widely accepted premise of a global economy based on infinite growth in a world that, for all its wonders, remains stubbornly finite.

The works from the Tontine series form the exhibition’s conceptual backbone and continue to mine that fertile ground between personal biography and structural critique that has in my case historically involved a kind of aesthetic autopsy of industrial alienation. The sense that modern economies treat human beings not as citizens but as increasingly defective cogs in a machine too big to fail and too blind to notice. The materials I chose, essentially trash (reclaimed and salvaged packaging paper: cement bags, potato sacks and fast food bags)—within my Tontine series reflect the precarity of bodies under systems of dominance, the disposability of labour, pulled through themes of supernatural violence and death. The reclaimed packaging paper, for instance, suggests commerce and trade, while the archival tape gestures toward the institutional—an attempt to preserve, classify, and control the narrative of who we are, and who gets remembered. How control is naturalised and sustained—through language, law, economy and even art.

The four sculptures on the show extend this conversation materially, I like to think of these works as triumvirates of dissonance: objects that straddle the line between durability and disposability, monumentality and neglect – that riff variously on notions of permanence in an age obsessed with obsolescence. The polyurethane doppelgängers of Beyond the Chrysanthemum present critical reflections on the disillusionment of ideological aspirations and the remnants of cast-off dreams. These identical pieces feature small, chaotic piles of objects that encapsulate the complexities of power and conflict, variously functioning as symbols for violence, commodification, materialism, capitalism’s encroachment on revolutionary ideals as well as socio-political hierarchies. A small crow, perched atop the assemblage, further evokes themes of scavenging and survival – a sifting through these remnants of cast-off dreams. Drawing inspiration from Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, the work offers a sobering appraisal of failed ideologies. While the polyurethane medium lends impermanence to these fleeting symbols of aspiration and loss – the fragility of hope amidst the harsh realities of history and the contradictions inherent in the pursuit of a better world remain.

The exhibition itself has been designed with a symmetry that might initially suggest a kind of formal reassurance. This is, of course, a trap. The symmetry is meant to lull the viewer into an expectation of order before gradually confronting them with the creeping suspicion that everything they are looking at is, in some sense, their own reflection. This is where the doppelgänger comes in—not the romantic, Byronic double, but the vanitas-inflected twin that whispers: “You too are complicit, and you too will end.” This doppelgänger is not meant to be a simple mirror image but a shadow self, a silent witness to a life unlived or a path not taken. I’ve often wondered if it's my more successful, less disillusioned counterpart, or perhaps merely the logical conclusion of the doppelgänger in a system of infinite growth: a parallel version of ourselves—a digital twin—endlessly consuming and producing in a world that can no longer sustain it. Ultimately, The Long Run is not solely concerned with dominance, but slippages in the cracks of its foundations, conjecture as to alternative futures and who constructs power, who benefits, and where the cost lies. Or what happens when hegemonic forces override communal ones. Underwritten by the mechanical war cry of: “Let’s Go! Hubris! Let’s Go!” silently chanted by the passively smug yet very dead office worker as featured in the Tontine work For a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

- Michael MacGarry