Precious Commodity

Exhibition catalogue for the 2017 exhibition Precious Commodity, a group exhibition featuring Eunice Luk, Ella Dawn McGeough, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, and Biliana Velkova, curated by 
Alison Cooley.

Articulating a tension between objects and their ways of being—their forms, their significance, 
their social and economic circulation—Precious Commodity brings together artworks that 
examine the complicated sweetness of things. Unanchoring objects from their exchange 
within capitalism, the artists in the exhibition resignify them as vessels for fantasy, desire, 
and alternate possibility. Reflecting on the nature of a world populated by things with 
definitive practical uses and monetary values, each artist playfully contends with form, 
usurping existing representations in the service of building new meanings. Ultimately, 
the exhibition asks how we come to identify with the world of stuff—how we negotiate the 
fraught ethics of consumerism, how we arrive at and move beyond “sentimental value,” and 
how we understand the lives of things often considered inanimate. Together, the artists in 
Precious Commodity look to objects not as static, fixed entities, but as tools for thinking with.

The catalogue features an essay by the curator, a reading list, artist bios, and exhibition checklist.

Curator
Alison Cooley

Artists
Eunice Luk Ella Dawn McGeough Juan Ortiz-Apuy Biliana Velkova

Publisher
Critical Distance

Binding
Paperback, full colour images

Size
6 x 9 inches
39 pages

ISBN
978 0992 113797