California artist Shannon Wright’s installation Mechanical Reproduction parodies the industrial-age compulsion to create means for mass-producing everyday comforts for the modern home. An oversized rubber stamp is utilized to produce patterned wallpaper whose whimsically overlapping impressions and uneven stamping display more a sense of human indecision rather than any kind of machinelike precision. For Wright, the piece is a kind of “misguided labor-saving device” that may indeed offer more complications than easy solutions to the problem of mechanical reproduction.
