James Bantone’s Scrap at New York Life Gallery in New York City examines the fragile construction of identity through manipulated commercial imagery, revealing the unsettling interplay between selfhood and commodification.
Drawing from commercial display catalogs, Bantone interrogates the eerie interplay between mannequins and their human counterparts, exposing the mechanics of self-fashioning in a neoliberal economy. Through a fusion of photography, sculpture, and painting, he distorts these mass-produced forms, unsettling the clean aesthetic of commercial imagery and revealing its underlying fragility. His work extends Michel Foucault’s notion of the “entrepreneur of the self,” where personal identity is shaped by market-driven forces, reducing individuals to curated surfaces and stylized commodities.
At the core of Scrap lies Bantone’s material transformation—Xeroxed catalogs transferred onto corroded steel plates, their surfaces scarred through chemical processes. This physical act of scraping, both destructive and generative, mirrors the way identity is stripped down and reconstructed under capitalism’s relentless demands. The weathered textures evoke urban decay, recalling the visual language of wheatpasted street advertisements, where images are layered, torn, and eroded by time. Through this reworking of industrial detritus, Bantone disrupts the sleek facade of mass production, foregrounding the residue and imperfections that mainstream aesthetics seek to erase.
Revisiting the Modernist trope of the mannequin, Bantone exposes its melancholic undertones—an empty vessel onto which an aspirational self is projected. His works collapse the boundary between subject and object, reflecting a contemporary condition in which personal identity is endlessly mediated, polished, and refashioned for public display. By engaging with the tension between human presence and its hollow simulation, Scrap invites a critical reflection on selfhood in an era where personal branding has become a necessity rather than a choice.
