We are pleased to share that Lyndon Barrois Jr’s “Second-Story Artifacts”, a project commissioned for the March 2026 issue of ArtReview, is out now.
Contributing to an issue that considers the present condition of museums, Barrois Jr.’s visual output critically examines the lens through which the Western world has historically viewed — and continues to view — the art and material culture of the Southern hemisphere. The work takes the form of a visual collage that borrows from the formats of auction catalogues in a range of styles, interwoven with film stills from Golden Age Hollywood Cinema and references drawn from art history. Through this assemblage, the project interrogates the legacies of colonial extraction and the narratives surrounding authorship, provenance, and value. Themes of forgery and theft surface and overlap through the imagery, punctuated by captions and commentaries that at times adopt an antagonistic tone.
Throughout the pages, colour checkers appear as markers of investigation. Tools associated with museum conservation and cataloguing — used to describe, analyse, and record — are repurposed here as signals that the subjects themselves need to remain open to scrutiny and re-examination.
March 12, 2026