Guitar Shop – The Gallery of Everything

About

The Gallery of Everything presents Guitar Shop: a sculptural installation of vernacular musical instruments from America and beyond. The exhibition is accompanied by the collaged (musical) objects of Felipe Jesus Consalvos: a self-taught Cuban art-maker, whose satirical and political opus was discovered long after his death.

Connecting the two is a manner of manufacture, a style born in the spirit of make-do. For the string (and no-string) instruments in Guitar Shop reflect 50 non-conformist makers, their names lost to the currents of time, their talismans reflecting profound and personal experiences of making and playing.

These remarkable objects — from improvised banjos and box guitars, to violins and tambourines — are more than just tools for making music. They are spectacular vernacular sculpture: some playable, some playable no more, some which combat the laws of physics and impede any possible usage.

Another maker whose practice incorporated instruments, Consalvos used political collage to skewer contemporary culture. As an immigrant, he relished the tropes of American jargon, taking pot-shots at the great and the good. Thus he reflected his (unwitting) peers, Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell, and foretold the satire of Peter Blake and Terry Gilliam.

Since its discovery, Consalvos’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is part of a number of collections including Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), American Folk Art Museum (New York) and Harvard Art Museums (Boston).