Ester Partegàs

Entering Samesation at Rice Gallery is like wandering into a giant architectural model for a civic plaza. This larger-than-life installation by Ester Partegàs comes complete with trees, benches, and planters, all carefully crafted from mat board and heavy paper.

Things become ominous, however, when you realize that the center of this symmetrical arrangement of greenery and seating is not an elegant sculpture or a contemplative fountain but a massive pylon housing a large, domineering ATM.

Walking around the installation, you begin to suspect the seemingly innocuous civic structure is in reality a Trojan horse, the dubious gift of some nefarious corporation. The trees are dark brown, rectangular columns with boxy, stark, and leafless branches sticking out of the top. The round planters sprout silver columns with disks of green as nature is translated into neat geometric forms. The taupe benches are circular and drum-like, and the central four-sided ATM “shrine” is executed in corporate gray-beige. The bland institutional tones of Partegàs’s color choices emphasize the impersonality.

Partegàs’s obsession for detail extends to recreating every design element of the ATM’s façade, right down to the card slot. Its control panel is meticulously crafted from silver paper with the “yes,” “no,” and “cancel,” buttons carefully outlined. The blank screen of the monolithic machine stares back at you like a dormant HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You sense its massive, silent presence, lurking and waiting. It seems to be monitoring rather than serving you.

The exaggerated scale places you face to face with the dead screen. The keypad is awkwardly located directly under your chin. Inserting a bankcard into the oversized slot would require you to reach up like a kid straining to put money on the counter at the candy store. The scale is intentionally designed to make you feel vulnerable and childlike—an inferior supplicant to the Great Oz or some all-powerful financial god. The really unnerving part of the installation is that the design’s realization does not seem inconceivable; who among us would be surprised to find this plaza in downtown Houston?

In placing the ATM, an object of commerce, in the location one would normally find an object of art, Partegàs comments on our priorities. You can sit on the benches and peacefully ponder the power and the beauty of the ATM as you would contemplate a sculpture. Forget throwing pennies into a fountain to make a wish—this object can dispense the cash you need to make all of your dreams come true.

In her artist’s statement, Partegàs mentions seemingly disparate things like suburban sprawl and totalitarian monuments. She explains how the scale of Nazi and Communist architecture was designed to make the individual feel insignificant. She sees a similar loss of individuality occurring in the repetitive architecture of sprawling modern subdivisions. The exhibit’s title, Samesation, is a comment on the growth of “sameness” in our world. The symmetrical, standardized components of her installation could be endlessly duplicated, mimicking the infinite expansions of planned communities, fast food franchises, and chain stores.

In other works, Partegàs has demonstrated her fascination with the deeper significance to be found in commonplace surroundings and consumer objects. In her drawings of people, she replaced their heads with shopping bags from chain stores like The Gap and Banana Republic. Detours (2001–2002) is series of huge drawings of tiny, ephemeral store receipts in which Partegàs replaced the item descriptions with shopping rationalizations. Texts like “A reward to myself” or “I’ve had a terrible day” run down the length of the receipt, directly across from the prices. For a 1999 work, #2 Homeless, Partegàs crafted an airplane passenger seat from Styrofoam and accessorized it with all the accoutrements of a peripatetic modern day businessperson: laptop, newspaper, compartmented airline food tray, shopping bags. Looking at it makes you wonder what anthropologists of the future will theorize about the transitory people who spent significant portions of their lives strapped into these tiny seats.

Partegàs’s work exposes the unsettling homogeneity of globalization. In Partegàs’s world, and ours, slick office buildings are the same in Hong Kong, New York, Moscow, or Paris, The Gap is The Gap is The Gap no matter where you are, and public spaces increasingly promote commerce instead of community.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer