Welcome to Maturity II
2022
Vinyl print with grommets, PVC stand, Sterilite container with plastic spigot, ingredients for Kristen Cavallari’s homemade baby formula (published on People.com, Mar 16, 2016, recipe redacted Mar 21, 2016), vinyl sticker
Parent Company is pleased to announce preLAUNCH, a solo exhibition by Kevin Dudley. preLAUNCH is comprised of a series of sculptures that satirize contemporary media consumption and push our always-connected reality to its logical—and deeply unsettling—extreme. The constellation of objects comes together to create a bizarre yet familiar ecosystem, where identity is manipulated, heightened, and commodified in service of commerce.
DEVICE is a prototype content player and bowl designed for the whole family—parents, children, and even pets. Made with a flesh-tone urethane shell and off-the-shelf video components, DEVICE plays a looping promotional video. The video advertises DEVICE itself as a fantastic invention that promises connection through yet another gadget you need to buy (each sold separately, batteries not included). DEVICE points to Tech’s recurring fantasy: that only it can resolve the challenges it has introduced.
For this exhibition, DEVICEs are filled with Kelce Mix, a collaboration between General Mills and the NFL stars, Travis and Jason Kelce. Purchased at an inflated scalper price, the cereal points to artificial and fleeting means of constructing value, feeding us celebrities at an ever-increasing pace.
easyfamily is an advertisement for DEVICE mounted on a 3D printed armature. The still image is constructed from a manipulated found photograph, combined with AI-generated personas. This generic white family stands in as the imagined consumer base. Throughout the show, race, along with other signifiers of identity, are flattened into a consumer-driven meaninglessness.
agree 2 AGREE was created with the data collected by a proprietary research tool designed to uncover consumer affinities across demographic and racial groups. The resulting sculpture fuses top-performing foods into a grotesque pie made of Keebler Readycrust, baked beans, Peter Pan peanut butter, Velveeta cheese, and Kraft mayonnaise.
Data emerges as a through-line in this exhibition, whether volunteered willingly, as in the case of the research tool, or covertly harvested in the case of AI. Ultimately, the work is about Tech’s promise to steamroll over humanity’s complexities by using data as the medium for that flattening. Why should you care, Tech might ask, if you have a cool product at the end of the day?
DEVICE is a prototype content player and bowl designed for the whole family—parents, children, and even pets. Made with a flesh-tone urethane shell and off-the-shelf video components, DEVICE plays a looping promotional video. The video advertises DEVICE itself as a fantastic invention that promises connection through yet another gadget you need to buy (each sold separately, batteries not included). DEVICE points to Tech’s recurring fantasy: that only it can resolve the challenges it has introduced.
For this exhibition, DEVICEs are filled with Kelce Mix, a collaboration between General Mills and the NFL stars, Travis and Jason Kelce. Purchased at an inflated scalper price, the cereal points to artificial and fleeting means of constructing value, feeding us celebrities at an ever-increasing pace.
easyfamily is an advertisement for DEVICE mounted on a 3D printed armature. The still image is constructed from a manipulated found photograph, combined with AI-generated personas. This generic white family stands in as the imagined consumer base. Throughout the show, race, along with other signifiers of identity, are flattened into a consumer-driven meaninglessness.
agree 2 AGREE was created with the data collected by a proprietary research tool designed to uncover consumer affinities across demographic and racial groups. The resulting sculpture fuses top-performing foods into a grotesque pie made of Keebler Readycrust, baked beans, Peter Pan peanut butter, Velveeta cheese, and Kraft mayonnaise.
Data emerges as a through-line in this exhibition, whether volunteered willingly, as in the case of the research tool, or covertly harvested in the case of AI. Ultimately, the work is about Tech’s promise to steamroll over humanity’s complexities by using data as the medium for that flattening. Why should you care, Tech might ask, if you have a cool product at the end of the day?