A Collection of Objects From the Only Purse I’ve Ever Owned

Michael Riesch

MEET THE ARTIST

Michael Riesch, also known as Cardboard Couch, is a visual artist, tattooist, and experimental musician working out of Asheville, North Carolina, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing from UNCA.

Michael’s visual work revolves around an exploration of found objects and the contemporary cultural debris that collects all about us, executed in a style he calls “observational and minimalistic.”

Featuring various pop-culture references, such as an old Spaghetti-O’s can, a Nintendo Gameboy, and Pokémon, his works explore and critique the mythology of contemporary American culture.

ABOUT THE WORK

Professor of Post-Laserbeam Anarchist Studies at the University of Hot Dogs, H.T. Coddlewink, says this about A Collection of Objects, “I fucking love it. It’s crude, unpretentious, and barebones punk. I love the printing of the work. The manner in which the pages present as washed-out, bleached, as if the objects depicted are desperate to be cleansed, to become unsoiled, purified in a crazed religiosity, which speaks to the fucking weirdness of American consumerism and the fucking ideology of dogmatic consumption. The images on the pages seem to be fading away, I think this comments on the transitory nature of material goods, the planned obsolesce of the plastic commodities that demand our attention and emotional subjugation in the hyper-accelerated Capitalist system we’re entangled in. The objects displayed are ghosts of themselves, already dead on arrival.”

To explore more fascinating works by Cardboard Couch, as well to make tattoo appointments visit his Instagram.