The work of senior N. Joy Dix reads both as a history of alcohols past and as an artistic statment on recycling. The piece chronicles his misguided Ciroc purchase through his "Fireball period" all the way to his experimentation with flavored Bacardi. It is, in essence, a coming of (legal) age story.
However, the piece stops there, an attempted distillation of a college student’s relationship with alcohol, and, frankly, it’s boring. One is immediately left to question the authenticity of Dix, as trademark dranks like Franzia and Banker’s Club are suspiciously omitted from his display. Rather than a true representation of his liver’s past, the row of glass bottles encapsulates the high points, a concocted and glamorized facade of top–shelf liquor and an affinity for Skinnygirl pinot. As an artist, Dix does his viewers a disservice, covering up the nights of Tang jungle juice and wine–bladder–slapping at Beijing, leaving one to ponder the truth behind every piece of frosted glass perched atop his cabinet.
On an aesthetic note, the linear display of bottles leaves something to be desired. The piece lacks dimensionality, texture and any means of drawing the viewer in—if anything, the piece seems all too integrated into the rest of Campus Apartments' kitchen layout. The colors of the bottles themselves, perhaps the only redeeming quality of the piece, are lost beneath a fine layer of dust and filth.
A piece which Dix described as an “alcoholic diary” should be less withholding in its account. We want to peer into his soul via boxes of Franzia from his freshman hall BYO and the Poland Spring water bottle of Smirnoff he shoved down his pants for last year's Fling concert.
It's a call we extend to bottle collectors everywhere: we want authenticity. We want the real. We want the raw. We want the Rossi.
