With the economy undergoing a severe downturn, and retailers reporting an especially slow sales season during what is typically the busiest time of the year, the organizers behind Everything Must Go could not have asked for more fitting circumstances for their upcoming exhibition, which will take place in a partially abandoned mall in Birmingham, Alabama. Curator Rachel Higgins rented one retail shop out of the over 60 vacant stores in the Century Plaza Shopping Mall, and from December 20 through January 3rd, twenty artists, including Sascha Braunig, Walton Creel, Matthew Farrell, Rachael Gorchov, Jess Perlitz, and others, will approach the space as a stage, rotating works on a daily basis in order to spotlight a specific group or artist. The project's title Everything Must Go touches on the fast pace of consumerism, which steers the rate at which malls are built and discarded, but it also carries with it a darker cadence, one that suggests that our current models for economic growth, which favor rapidity and waste, cannot persist.
Image: Century Plaza Shopping Mall (Photos by Kate Merritt Davis)