Brad Troemel presented solo exhibition Seven Great Ideas For Your Home at Stockholm’s LOYAL gallery from February 13 to March 5, 2016.
Continuing his tradition of adding bundled values to works, Troemel created a positive cast of his investments in plastic and filled that cast with another material – handmade plantable paper – and used that material as a mask to conceal whether or not the investment was resting behind the work’s front.
Working in a kind of lottery fashion, some of the works are solely the material and others contain the goods their surface describes, whether that’s rare Beanie Babies, precious metals, or early American coins. The frames hold larger stories behind them: plantable paper is a biodegradable eco-paper that is made with post-consumer materials (“no trees harmed for this paper!”) and embedded with seeds. When the paper is planted in a pot of soil, the seeds grow and the paper composts away. All that is left behind is flowers, herbs or vegetables and no waste.**
Brad Troemel’s Seven Great Ideas For Your Home was on at Stockhom’s Loyal Gallery running from Feb 13 to Mar 5, 2016.
Header image: Brad Troemel, ‘Security Sliding Frame and Silk Road Mushrooms’ (2016). Detail. Photo by Calle Tillberg. Courtesy the artist + LOYAL, Stockholm.
