Project: Keeping Time

Our newest venture, Projects, continues the Gallery's history of providing a dedicated platform and meaningful opportunities for artists. Projects will create a multi-arts space for experimentation and exploration. With a monthly program, Projects aim is to enliven artists to document and share their creative practice as they present or progress a new body of work.

For our first digital project, Tyler Payne brings together work from her newest series which investigates the invasive nature of social media advertising and the increased commodification of The Body. Using a mixture of symbols from art historical portraits of the nude, Kim Kardashian’s 'brand', and Biblical imagery, Payne explores the insidious deification of celebrities in this new frontier of capitalism.

Keeping Time is a series of three electro-bri-collage animations that investigate how myth cycles are rife with stories designed to oppress women and their agency. These narratives often ‘legitimize male privilege by muting female authority.’ Kim Kardashian is the muse of these animations. After bursting into notoriety and fame in 2007 with a sex-tape, Kardashian has built a billion dollar empire. My work is preoccupied with the fact that the invention of social media has allowed for new intensities of commodification and the intrusion of capitalist commodification into more intimate forms of life than ever before (the commodification of communication via emojis for example). In terms of a ‘capitalist’ who has mastered accumulation through these new commodity forms, Kim Kardashian is, in my view, exemplary. The animations are littered with visual examples of her beauty empire. The project of the Kardashian body is an attempt to satisfy the symbolic demands of the male gaze in the real. Kardashian has, in a way, cosmetically enhanced and shaped her body to become a surrealist object itself, a superimposition of the ideal and the real.

- Tyler Payne

Online until 31 March 2021