Andy Fitz’s
One Twenty-Nine
Curated by Benjamin Stafford
4/10/26-5/2/26
The junk shops are informal sorting stations, vans arrive stuffed with furniture, and general domestic clearance loosely piled in open boxes and laundry baskets, they take everything in. Stuff deemed worthy of resale will be pulled into the backroom to go to markets. I found a photo album with colour digital photo prints of a garden and living room and a few sweet wrappers flattened out and glued down. Each entry into the album was marked with numbers written out in longhand, I assume these are timestamps. A worn out fudge wrapper reads Eleven Ten. I went back the next day to the same junk shop to see if there was anything else and found another album buried in a box full with kitchen utensils, bright yellow napkins and a glass ashtray I recognised from the interior shots of the living room.
These shops are a fixture of the place I live, a fascist country historically and, it’s now clear, at present. At the time I was meant to be producing an exhibition for a large gallery back in Ireland, the first work I’d made since I changed my name. I filled my studio with the objects from this stranger’s home, and lost my time sifting through and reorganising the world glued down with such precision.