Commonwealth & Council presents Lifetime Guarantee, two site-specific installations in the rear stairway adjacent to the office space by Eduardo Consuegra.

Suspended between two wood studs of an exposed wall, three framed magazine collages in metal frames find their momentary resting place within a temporary bed of form-fitting acoustic foam. For the duration of the four-month exhibition, each one of the framed collages will migrate to the cardboard display surface on verso.

Partially buried under an overlay of smoke screens (LEE filters), the magazine collages highlight advertisements of Betamax recording devices, Sony sound systems, Polaroid cameras that announce their progressive technological feats, ultimately foreshadowing their demise and discontinuity. Although obsolete according to today’s standards, these gadgets and gizmos were once ubiquitous commodities at the time of their promise and proposed futurity. In most cases, the pairs of South American and North American magazine tear sheets appear identical—a hybridization of imported products of Asian technology and American marketing strategy—but upon closer inspection, subtleties found such as Spanish language that caters to local consumers, indicate a global economy that has not yet arrived at its universal standardization.

Previously shown in 2011, Untitled (After FGT) is an impenetrable wall of entangled strands of cascading nickel-plated, steel beads. Reinstalled at CW&C, it is now anchored to the skeleton of a bygone stairway, counter-balancing its weight on top of a cardboard platform lined with acoustic foam. Both site-specific installations utilize the acoustic foam not only as a display mechanism, but also as a symbolic material that absorbs and safeguards the reverberation of histories as they are retold through discovery and hindsight.

Eduardo Consuegra lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include: The White Album, Richard Telles Fine Art; Two Fold, South of Sunset; Perishable Fold, Commonwealth & Council; Black Rabbit, White Hole, Samuel Freeman Gallery; Flicker, Control Room; Banquet of the Jackal, Luckman Gallery; On Forgery: Is One Thing Better Than Another?, LAXART; and Second Nature: The Valentine/Adelman Collection, Hammer Museum. Consuegra is represented by Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles.