At Future Tenant, Jessica Fenlon’s installation comments on the media’s ability to fold itself into the channels of communication in and around everyday life. Fenlon has used newspapers to upholster chairs, and cover tables, lamps, cup and eyeglasses, while a TV broadcasts snow, to represent the media’s infiltration into private places. Here, human inhabitants would live in the shadow of information spaces where stories turn into furniture, and abstract concepts transform into expansive, meticulously decorated imaginary houses.

Fenlon’s juxtaposition of print and screen implies the point where one genre gives way to another. The older medium wants to reinvent itself in the image of the new but its existing conventions won’t allow such a dramatic transformation. Instead, the newspaper invades where it can, its rambling spread over furnishings evincing its strain to approximate the rhythms and mannerisms of the illusory reveries of television. This vision acknowledges that the media is something real itself, something that exists on its own and that might have its own needs and agenda.

~ Alice Winn