The Good Life addresses the relationship between class, material culture and authenticity through an ironic assessment of two social attitudes that have transpired over the past decade: lifestyle minimalism and wellness culture. Encouraging a form of consumerist individualism that moves from the aesthetic to the political: “if your environment is pleasurable and safe, everything is fine”, these attitudes feign cultural and political neutrality in their presentation of coded narratives of colonialism as told through art historical innuendo, Modernism and ethnography.

Coming from Western European modernism and mid-century design, lifestyle minimalism proffers a better model of living through more authentic home décor and original artefacts. Similarly, the wellness industry assuages spiritual and bodily anxieties via self-help rituals, exotic cosmetics, and healing devices. Through the appropriation of cultures and objects, the aestheticising of the other, these trends perpetuate problematic systems of value and cultural ownership.  

Through two exhibition-specific commissions, video, installation, photography and collage, The Good Life interrogates these issues with perspicacious parody, irony and sardonic wit. Embodying such roles as scientist, colonial explorer, corporate retail team member, or alter ego, the artists critically appraise the two interconnected trends. They interrogate society’s obsessions and seductions; the championing of self-fulfilment and ‘good taste’.