Important Images
Christmas at Gumps
March 1-30, 2018
Ramons Tailor Gallery, 628 Jones Street
San Francisco
Based on photographs taken with acquisitive desperation during the 2017 Christmas shopping season at the now defunct San Francisco department store Gump’s, Christmas at Gump’s (2018, Leala Hewak) explores the psychological world of the luxury economy. Darkly comic productions populated with treasures out of reach to most of us—hundred-dollar ornaments, three-hundred-dollar pillows, thousand-dollar perfumes—these photomontages allude to Dutch old master still-life paintings, which likewise portrayed luxuries available only to the wealthy, infusing them with grim mortality. Like the Dutch Republic in its golden age, San Francisco’s combination of old and new money allowed Gump’s to thrive in a time marked by economic uncertainty.