CORE contemporary art

Curated by Marionne Contreras

“Deluge in a Paper Cup” gathers objects that hold more than their size should allow. Installed together on a shared shelving structure, the exhibition brings together works that function as miniature cosmologies, portable relics, devotional forms, secret mementos, and artifacts for uncertain futures.

Borrowing its title from a lyric in Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, the exhibition imagines the object as a fragile container for overwhelming things: memory, catastrophe, tenderness, desire, grief, humor, survival—the weight of emptiness even. 

“All is a deluge, held precariously in something disposable.” 

The works in the exhibition domesticate crisis more than they monumentalize it. They reduce large emotional or historical forces into intimate scales that can be carried, shelved, hidden, collected. Held. Thrown.

Walter Benjamin said, “To live is to leave traces.” The exhibition embraces objects not as permanence, but as evidence: traces of use, belief, anticipation, repair, affection, or collapse. Together, the works propose how small things can hold worlds disproportionate to their physicality. Intimately. Assiduously..