Adam Payne “A. Payne Products: Quality Assured”
Bleecker Street Arts Club
This event has ended.
Fascinated with the constantly evolving history of consumer goods, Adam Payne refashions familiar objects into his own. By putting them on display, he defamiliarizes the ordinary, turning the useful into something other and strange. In A. Payne Products: Quality Assured, Payne explores the dissonance between the final packaged product, ready for consumption, and the veiled production process leading to its creation. The modern day consumer is faced with an abundance of choices relating to the quality and manufacturing of the final product: “organic,” “local,” “fair trade,” “eco-friendly,” “all natural.” These socially acceptable labels appear desirable and safe to consumers leading to a false sense of guarantee.
For this exhibition, Payne will transform an entire floor of the gallery into an emporium of A. Payne Products, including Piperine Organic eggs, Precise Standard Measures, Homeopathic Remedies, and Nicotiana tabacum. Encompassing an entire gallery wall, the Piperine Organics draw from metsubushi (eye crusher), an old and peculiar defense practice of the Japanese ninja, in which hollowed-out eggs are filled with pepper, mud, or glass and used to temporarily blind assailants. Each Piperine Organic egg is filled with ground pepper, packaged in cotton, and displayed in a handmade case reminiscent of those that house military supplies. While metsubushi are intended to inflict harm, Payne instead references the potential to inflict harm. Conversely, in the Homeopathic Remedies, the artist conjures the specter of health and wellbeing through the creation of “cures” for everyday shortcomings such as tackiness, irritability, promptness, rowdyness, hypersensitivity, or even cheapness. All A. Payne Products, with their familiar litany of seals, labels, and branding, initially assure the viewer, but their obvious homemade quality and seemingly slack construction intentionally divulge the production that processed quickly provoking feelings of unease and imbuing the works with an insidious “what if” element.
Adam Payne lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Media
Schedule
from October 10, 2013 to November 09, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-10-10 from 19:00 to 21:00