In 2009, Seth Price showed previously unaccounted for work that he originally produced in 2004.

He says: “Sometimes it’s good to go forward and then double back, and circle around again. To those who turned their feet around so that their tracks would confuse their pursuers: why not walk backward?”

This particular slip into Price’s personal history, though, is not totally arbitrary as the work, itself, is a set of 2004 calendars.

There are few things as worthless as an out of date calendar.

This irony is amplified as the calendar’s content is composed of pre-AbEx American painting and graphic design tropes dating from the early 1990s that read as “futuristic.”

Painters like Thomas Hart Benton, who was one of the most famous painters of his own time, are now only modestly well known.

The “hot” cursive fonts and gradiated neon backdrops read the same way: they are – for better or for worse – part of the dustbin of history, not unlike an out-of-date wall calendar.

By combining all of these obsolete elements, Price creates a portrait of obsolescence itself. The fact of obsolescence.

Memento Mori.