Demo Yellow
Demo Yellow
£12.00Printed on glossy magazine paper, twelve enlarged smartphone images of cabin crew members holding up life jackets are printed full frame across twelve pages. The quality of the photos is patchy. Some are formally well composed, while others are rushed, or even printed out of focus. What the pictures capture, however, is impressive considering the mundanity of the information being communicated and the number of times we have likely witnessed this scene before.
On each page a standard issue inflatable yellow vest is held aloft, or donned, in its lifeless state. The contours of these two-dimensional monochromes are reminiscent of images and shapes we may have seen in art books. Cubist guitar bodies and giant flower heads, or the kinds of silhouettes found in Jean Arp’s or Ellsworth Kelly’s colour compositions come to mind. With absentminded elegance the presenters of these ring shapes attempt to engage an indifferent audience with little interest. One steward bowing towards the camera reveals a bald patch on the crown of his head. A hostess with downcast eyes appears to be uttering a prayer.
In this project banal health and safety instructions are transformed into a tragicomic form of performance art. Demo Yellow can therefore be read in parallel with Blamey’s film Rice (2022), where a strange sequence of agricultural workers’ movements is documented, and his installation Flying Colours (2013-20) which, in essence, is a study of the colour red. Here, once more, the artist has dipped his hand into a bucket of sand and pulled out a nugget of gold.
Date of publication July 2026. Taking advance orders.