Ode to a pallete

Stainless steel, car paint, liquid glass
15x80120 cm
2019

The final grant project within the study at ART WHO ART course "Art business. Theory and practice".

This is high end pallete. A very simple thing, that at the same time is a very "small" and a very "big" . I wanted to make a very controversial symbol, an expensive and aesthetic object based on a bunch of the cheapest materials.

The idea that today a "thing" can be nothing special and at the same time can attrack global attention, can be an instrument of earning money or an "icon" haunts me. This is a very cool concept of perverted perception and circulation of things. For example, a pallet – knocked together pieces of wood, it costs just a couple of hundred rubles. Someone holds a box of rotten tomatoes on a pallet, while another uses it as a decor element in design or a finishing material in architecture. For some, pallets are simply a working tool, a piece of shit that rubs fingers and eyes, while someone else makes good money on this simple thing.

10 years ago I packed furniture on pallets in a warehouse, and now I build art objects of them and make events. Today you can build almost any "thing" into an absolute or throw it in the trash.

We see the life of a pallet among the Moscow crowd - this is one of the most tested materials of any street festival or rave, at the same time, it is the subject of ridicule and the hero of sticker packs on social networks.

Today people hate the "thing" and idealize it at the same time.

During the performance at the Mutabor club I endowed the pallet with feelings, in a certain way elevated it to the absolute and turned the rules of the game between a person and an object.

The pallet stood in the middle of a gigantic hall with high ceilings. All the attention was directed to it, only the pallet was illuminated by cold rays of light. there was ambient sound in the space. People entered the hall and walked directly to the object. The closer they got, the more and louder the pallet sounded. Industrial sounds broke through the ambient. It associated the idealized version of an object with its primary habitat and purpose. when the pallet lured people as close as possible, flashes of light formed from under it and the sound became as loud and unpleasant as possible. Thus, the object at the same time aroused interest and made being around almost unbearable.