Heather Phillipson’s FINAL DAYS deconstructs the real-life retail environment, imagining the modern department store as a stagnant and obsolete landscape in the wake of the click-to-buy convenience of online shopping.

Structured episodically, FINAL DAYS presents an installation of six videos across clustered monitors that function as sequential departments, mimicking the ordering and sectioning of a typical department store: Bedroom, Underwear, Towels & Textiles, Hosiery, Office, and Special Offers. Each contained section either conjures or deviates from social, personal and intimate scenarios that inform our relationships as consumers within retail markets, behaviors transformed by the material absence of digital commerce. Through an engaging live encounter and reading, Phillipson brings together screens, audio bleeds, and material conglomerations that resemble packaging, stacking, and merchandise to combine the technological bombardment of a televisual retail arena within the unboxed promise of an online warehouse.  

Image credit: Heather Phillipson, yes, surprising is existence in the post-vegetal cosmorama installation, 2013, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, UK; photo by Colin Davidson, courtesy of the artist. Heather Phillipson, sub-fusc love-feast installation, 2014, Dundee Contemporary Arts, UK; photo by Ruth Clark, courtesy of the artist.