NYAB Event - Paul Dacey “Made in China”

Paul Dacey “Made in China”

Y Gallery (the Bowery)

This event has ended.

Y Gallery presents “Made in China”, an exhibition of prints by New York artist Paul Dacey. This show, which made it’s debut in Beijing in 2006, consists of digitally enhanced, pop- inspired images of a crumpled plastic shopping bag bearing the ever present “MADE IN CHINA”
stamp. These works address production and consumption, power, and confrontation. Dacey manages to make them look luxurious and desirable as they still conserve their physical emptiness.

In “MATERIALS and METALS”, the bag is presented in a series of twenty five richly colored variations and metamorphoses from disposable item into “something of virtual value”. The bag takes on a sheen; it exudes luminescence and becomes a nugget of gold, lime green satin, smooth vinyl, a pool of mercury, molten lava. In “FIRE/ICE”, Dacey’s bag reappears in twelve variations of red and yellow, China’s national colors, and the United States’ red, white, and blue. These colors find themselves woven arterially, as if they were a simultaneous intellectual merging and tangling of the world’s current superpowers. Dacey implies a global warming between the two countries and also refers to the consequences of our technologies. “IN the EYE of the OTHER” offers us the same image as a diptych, two portraits facing one another, upside down from each other, one in China’s colors, one in America’s, conferring or confronting—either way, the
“Made in China” within speaks volumes.