Benjamin Chadbond, Her Last Cigarette, 2013, framed digital C-Type print, 20.5 x 25.5 cm. Right: Benjamin Chadbond, Untitled, 2014, framed digital C-Type print, 20.5 x 25.5 cm

Benjamin Chadbond’s solo exhibition at MOP Gallery, ‘I Told You I Needed You,’ is a bitter retort to the impact of a romance gone.

He’s pretty cut up over its demise. And it’s always staring back at him. Almost awkwardly over-emotional, the artist revels in the junk left behind when someone important leaves your life. The past can be seen anywhere, in a cigarette packet, an empty bathtub, or even in the Maccas coke hastily scrunched into a car door pocket.

These are the kind of objects that are the subject of the photographs that line the wall of Chadbond’s exhibition. The images are of anonymous domestic spaces: crumbs that line the everyday. Not particularly outstanding objects, but ones that witness us as we go about our lives. Every element is filled with a memory.

It is almost as though the artist is attempting to capture the moments where we pause, and are overcome by what was, a past that will never be again.

The images in ‘I Told You I Needed You’ straddle both an anxiety in attempting to understand our emotions as well as the way we forcefully assign meaning to the stuff that surrounds our lives.

This exhibition is absurd and at times quite uncomfortable, but it rings as annoyingly true. Our emotions can be pathetic sometimes, but how do you just ignore that?

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What: ‘I Told You I Needed You’ by Benjamin Chadbond
Where: MOP Gallery, Chippendale
When: Wednesday to Sunday until the 1^st of March.
How much:  FREE
Visit: http://www.mop.org.au/current.html