Hans Schabus’s exhibition “Remains of the Day” catalogues his family’s refuse––the residual leftovers from one year’s worth of foodstuffs and consumables. Cleaned and organized into groups, his empty bottles, electrical appliances, clothes, and other household items stretch the entire length of the gallery and its reception space. While the appropriation of refuse has a reasonably significant art-historical legacy, Schabus’s rendition confronts current trends in ephemeral sculpture and consumptive behavior head-on.
The Vienna-based artist asks the viewer to engage with the forms, tones, and textures created by the mix of objects and their uniform order. It is clear he has an interest in reinvigorating the sculptural qualities of his collection; a stack of used tires stand out, like a totem to the work’s post-Minimalist underpinning. As a viewer, one evaluates Schabus and what his everyday habits say about him, but while many of the items point toward a stereotypical bohemian artist lifestyle (a pail of cigarette butts and a disproportionate amount of beer bottles and cans), Schabus’s softer side also shines through with the inclusion of familial artifacts, including kids’ toys and a desiccated Christmas tree. This is not an attack on consumerism, as he presents what seems to be a fairly modest amount of trash for one family to accumulate over a whole year. Rather, his concerns lie in making the unseen aspects of the everyday visible, and in doing so, he has invested them with the basic sculptural principals of form, scale, and volume.
