HOUSTON, TX.- Contemporary Arts Museum Houston announced the exhibition OUT OF STOCfl. Organized and curated by CAMH’s Teen Council, the group show features works by 32 Houston-area teen artists responding to questions surrounding consumer culture, accumulative waste, digitization dystopias, and exploitation.

OUT OF STOCfl reflects on the compulsion to fulfill endless desires. From material greed to tech-enabled obsession, the artworks in the exhibition represent a generation born into the contradiction between surplus and increasingly exhausted resources. Today, as teens mature in a world dominated by sales and social media, the hunger for more material goods and virtual social validation creeps closer to a climax.

With CAMH’s Teen Council program celebrating its 25th anniversary, this year’s cohort of teens aimed to make this year’s biennial stand out from the rest. This year’s exhibition defines itself through a new lens of contemporary politics, considering identity as a means to inform dynamics between people and power rather than a tool for introspection. These vantage points help construct readings of a broader landscape that are both foreign and familiar. Selected works encompass a wide range of 2D and 3D media, including experimental video, photography, large-scale painting, soft sculpture, found- objects-assemblage, prescription medicine, and more.

Certain works in the exhibition examine dichotomies of digital versus material lives. Works such as Bells Bosell’s Illusion of Abundance (2024) uses early PC aesthetics to highlight the information excess that flood contemporary cyberspaces. Other works examine the wasteful byproducts that are often invisible to the consumer but continue to build a more dire future. Edna Urrutia’s Home no longer mine (2024) images a polluted beach in Ghana due to mass production of fast fashion while Amelia Craypo’s Clutterbug (2024) uses an allegorical spider web to examine the constant buildup of excess items and belongings typically used to capture prey.

The exhibition was developed out of an open call from Houston-area teen artists responding to the questions: What is the line between product and person? What are you consuming? Is it consuming you? When does consumption cross the line between want and need? The current Teen Council cohort spent weeks reviewing each of the over 150 works submitted before culling down the list to the selected works, emphasizing pieces that take on formal risk with unique perspectives that demonstrate how teen vantages often align closely to adult concerns.

Through these works, teen artists grapple with the symptoms of consumption society, including doom-scrolling, burnout, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, and the human exploitations of war and labor. While all demographics are affected by the adverse environmental and psychological effects caused by such dependency, teens are uniquely poised to receive more of consumer culture’s dysfunctional outcomes in our lifetimes than the conveniences it urges. This exhibition invites viewers to negotiate their contributions to systems both rewarded and suffocated by participation, and it warns against hidden costs, including extinctions at the scale of life, identity, and culture.