The Golden Shuffle: roomsheet

_{The Golden Shuffle (installation view), 2011}

Brydee Rood and Matthew Crookes are interested in the low status attached to certain-quite costly to produce-materials, and in ways that these materials can be redeemed and re-ascribed with value. In The Golden Shuffle at ST PAUL St Gallery, Rood and Crookes will come together to create a meditation on the culture of waste, and indeed the necessity for continued and increasing superfluity in consumer culture.

Brydee Rood is an artist whose practice approaches the shamanistic, making totem objects, assemblages and masks as well as activating the objects performance. She takes low, commonly discarded materials, rubbish and the receptacles which the rubbish is collected in and transforms them into bunting or combines them with lights. Her totemistic practice has cargo cult connotations. However, instead of attempting to obtain the 'material wealth' of post industrialised society the works ward against a society whose relationship to consumption leads to overlooking the means by which products are manufactured and the possibility of consumption having consequences.

The ritualistic possibilities of cheap plastics and two dollar shop treasure is also a feature of Matthew Crookes’ work, which ranges from small amulet-like objects strewn across the ground to aphorisms formed with plastic letters. Crookes takes the gaudy imitation opulence that flows in and out of variety shops around the world and repurposes it towards art. Yet this transubstantiation is curiously incomplete, the works do not reveal an increased value, rather the valueless nature of their base materials.

_{The Golden Shuffle (installation view), 2011}

_{The Golden Shuffle (installation view), 2011}

_{The Golden Shuffle (installation view), 2011}

_{The Golden Shuffle (installation view), 2011}

_{The Golden Shuffle (installation view), 2011}