Failure Studies is an ongoing photographic project upon which artist Todd Molinari embarked as a sustained engagement with the question of what defines or determines success and failure in our current historical period. It is also a recognition: the recognition of image-fatigue, of the forces that conspire to devitalize the human, of the wreckage of absolute utopias and their effects on art. Rather than proposing an end to art, Failure Studies considers the exhaustion of its current mode of contemporaneity. In its wake, the exhibition opens space to renegotiate the conditions of the definitions of art and the conditions of the possibility of art-making in the face of repetition, unfulfilled promise, and structures of ignorance.

At a moment when accepted definitions of “contemporary art” feel increasingly unsatisfactory and not up to the challenges of our times, the exhibition investigates what remains obscured beneath dominant aesthetic languages and cultural narratives – and which new forms of expression become possible once those structures begin to recede. Failure Studies is both an investigation of the contemporary and a deliberate destabilization of the familiar, of cultural muscle memory and what is accepted as second nature. 

Failure Studies does not have the pretensions to give definitive answers. It is, in fact, an invitation to restless inquiry and to committed dissatisfaction without the cheap consolations of “quick fixes” or aesthetic tricks. Instead, it engages these tensions directly, producing works that embrace vulnerability, ambiguity, and emotional immediacy as necessary forms of inquiry.

This exhibition is supported through The Ford Family Foundation and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

toddmolinari.cargo.site / @toddmichaelmolinari

Photodocumentation Aaron Wessling / @singlefile_studio