Jamison Chās Banks:
STORE Vol. II
form & concept | August 2023
In STORE Vol. II, Jamison Chās Banks recreates a 1980's convenience store with the help of four Santa Fe-based colleagues. The installation draws from the Santa Fe-based artist's childhood experiences with material culture, transforming commercial objects such as Hostess fruit pies and cigarette cartons into layered simulacrums that challenge viewers to reconsider our understanding of the objects we consume and the emotions and memories they evoke.
Following a collaborative exhibition of the STORE series at Vital Spaces in 2019, Vol. II further explores the convergence of nostalgia and consumerism. Banks uses screen printing to faithfully reproduce product labels on paper, wood and fiber, demonstrating memory’s influence over our purchasing habits and identifying stores as sites of financial and emotional interchange.
“The store does kind of take care of you," says Banks. "If you develop a relationship with the owners and the people who work there, they start to cater to your needs,”
Projects
Jamison Chās Banks’ curatorial efforts on STORE Vol. II were directly influenced by three earlier projects: the original STORE installation at Vital Spaces, Heidi Brandow’s Working with Kin exhibition at form & concept, and a collaboration between Banks and Eliza Naranjo Morse at the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts.
My contributions: Curatorial oversight of Jamison Chās Banks
Artwork: Jamison Chās Banks (header & featured images), Heidi Brandow, Brian Fleetwood, Treston Chee, Eliza Naranjo Morse
Photography: Marylene Mey, Byron Flesher
Marketing Writing: Spencer Linford