A Picture is worth a thousand words, this one is worth a thousand pounds.”
20th May – 9th June 2012
With such words Hayden Kays ironically and conspicuously illustrates how situation – and time – related art can and should be. A painter, sculptor and printmaker, Kays has developed a body of works that focus upon delivering culturally challenging messages that range from the hard-hitting to the absurd.
Kays places imagery borrowed from mass culture, a witty, (if not) acerbic world play that render the notion of a self-contained art object obsolete. For Kays not only is anything possibly art but he routinely subjects his works to changes affected by the complex aesthetic, psychological, social and economic conditions of today’s experience. His chosen mediums of print and photography are governed by a principle of reproducibility. With a preference for utilising a breadth of social and everyday references and an emphasis on replication, Kays is pitched in comparison to the Pop Artists of 1950s Britain and America. For them, as for Kays, art should not solely aim to reflect the statures of artistic excellence, but rather a range of social practices.
It is no coincidence that within his body of works his choice of topics range so widely, his work is marked both in conception and style by an impulsive lightness of touch. Kays is able to respond to the world of mass capitalist culture by styling himself as the joker. From here he is neither entirely impartial nor wholly culpable. Rather, his work toys between serious affirmation and an ironic foreboding.
His decision to style much of his work in a visual iconography normally reserved for publicists, is a deliberate attack on the way information is currently conveyed.
Between shock headlines and bold by-lines, the modern viewer is exposed to a daily and unending plethora of messages -commercial, political and subversive. With the witty words and uncomfortable images, or even uncomfortable words and attractive images, Kays challenges the viewer not to passively accept what they see in the gallery or anywhere else.
Household Name is Kays’ first solo show. He was featured in the Independent as one of ‘a new generation of Pop artists’.
