Working across porcelain and stoneware, metal, wood, and painting, New York based Genesis Belanger creates tableaux that draw from, and critique, the aesthetics of capitalist production and consumption. Her work is characterized by an idiosyncratic visual language that repurposes everyday objects into often seductive, yet unsettling, surrogates for human emotions and societal anxieties. Informed by her experience as a prop-styling assistant, Belanger’s installations mimic the semiotic strategies of advertising—using beauty, nostalgia, and humor to evoke psychological responses. Yet, in Belanger’s hands, these familiar symbols are recontextualized, shifting from tools of persuasion to agents of critical reflection.

For her exhibition at Pace, Belanger will present a series of installations that transform the gallery space into a labyrinth of altered everyday vignettes. Throughout this staging, motifs repeat and evolve, each configuration offering new perspectives on the themes of the work. Complicating notions of interiority and exteriority, elements of domestic furniture—a vanity table, the contents of a fridge, and a vacuum cleaner—will be punctuated by life-size trees bearing porcelain cherries and melons. These eerily anthropomorphic objects suggest narratives about the human condition while also exploring nature's reduction to backdrop. In works like the mosaic 16 Bit Eden (2024), where video game-like pixelation merges with floral motifs, depictions of the natural world are relegated to embellishments, reflecting our desire to commodify and shortcut direct engagement with organic reality.

Working primarily in ceramics, Belanger employs techniques that emphasize the tactile, hand-made quality of her work, in deliberate contrast to the mass-produced objects her sculptures often mimic. She mixes pigment directly into the clay before rolling it out into flat sheets and shaping them into three-dimensional forms. This labor-intensive process imbues each piece with a sense of individuality and imperfection, resisting the homogenization of consumer goods.

In addition to ceramics, Belanger has incorporated a range of materials—fabric, wood, metal—into her new sculptures. For example, Cause and Effect (2024), a stoneware vacuum cleaner made with silk cashmere suit material, elevates the mundane object to a status of luxury while also questioning the gendered expectations associated with domestic tools. By articulating her conceptual investigations through the very medium of her work, Belanger sharpens her exploration of how context shapes our understanding of nature, labor, and identity.