Unpacking, Wheels
Royal Academy, London (2022), South London Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery part of New Contemporaries 2019-2020
Yams, mirrors, cardboard, metal trolleys, cellophane plastic
146cm x 98cm, 120 x 125 x 70 cm, 146cm x 98cm

Unpacking, Wheels 01.  Leeds Art Gallery

Detail

Unpacking, Wheels 02. Leeds Art Gallery

Unpacking, Wheels 03, South London Gallery. Detail

Unpacking, Wheels 04. Detail

Unpacking, Wheels, Feeder
Tarnished silver spoons, grease stains, mirrors, cardboards, plastics, metal trolley
150 x 175 cm

View from above

 

Re-encasing and amending a number of commodities, Perez Evans presents us with a series of semi-opened parcels in transit, parked temporarily in the exhibition space. Through various optical illusions, created by propping mirrors opened with live root vegetables and others with tarnished silver spoons, he creates an illusion of goods suspended in mid-air, which also produce the image of wheels that are floating. The artist looks at how historical processes of illusion continue being present in consumer culture, where infinitely recurring sequences of class struggle, aspiration and power continue hallucinatorally haunting the present.   Packing material, transportation trolleys and other shipping debris are left visible encasing the work, implying and giving visibility to many of the bodies of labour present in chains of production, bodies usually cleverly hidden with the purpose of further auratic hallucination in consumer culture and the art world.