This Unremarkable Life

This Unremarkable Life

Jake Brush
2025, 18:04 min, color, sound, HD video

Description

This Unremarkable Life presents an unsettling array of characters welded together by language and contained within a world that collides “trash television” with contemporary internet culture. The hostess is played by the artist in a blond wig reminiscent of Christian dieting influencer Gwen Shamblin Lara. Her monologue, the driving narrative force of the work, appropriates heavily altered transcriptions from an episode of the American television show Hoarders (2009 - present) about a man addicted to keeping pet rats. As the hostess continues her speech, more characters constructed from American mass media tropes abduct the narrative. A motivational speaker for men, a beauty queen having a birthday party, a man with a home security camera strapped to his head, and an array of similarly absurd figures join in a frenetic and urgent call to examine what it looks like to adapt media personalities for personal satisfaction.