While fast food chains are trying ever harder to expand their interior design repertoire, going to great lengths to convince customers that this time will be different, New York-based artist Roxy Paine is drawing attention to the trappings of the prototypical fast food experience, and he's doing it through sculpture. Currently exhibited at Chicago's Kavi Gupta Gallery is Carcass, a minutely detailed, full-sized wooden diorama of the platonic McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, what have you. Just as a McDouble is more about conjuring the idea of a burger than about being an impressive example of one, Paine is drawing on deeply ingrained associations and expectations. Ladies and gentlemen, that's what we like to call flipping the script.
Still, as Emanuel Aguilar, director of the Kavi Gupta, explained to Co.Exist, "as you start exploring the piece in detail, you notice that it doesn't seem correct, that there's something off." Reaching for this uncanny something might be exactly where Paine want us, after, as he puts it, seeing the ordinary translated "from one visual language to another," its normal functions rendered obsolete.
Paine, who has been producing sculptures since the early '90s, gleaned his interest in dioramas from trips to the American Museum of Natural History while studying art in New York. The parallel piece in his current exhibit depicts a control room, straight out of, say, a 1960s Cold War drama. Check it out this way.
· An Incredibly Detailed Wood Replica Of A Fast Food Joint To Make You Question Fast Food [Co.Exist]
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· All Artistry posts [Curbed National]