Keith Coventry : Inhaler

Keith Coventry
Inhaler
London, UK: The Multiples Store, 1998
7.5 x 3 x 4.2 cm
Cast plastic found inhaler
Edition of 50 initialed and numbered copies

"What at first appears to be a true-to-size plastic model of an asthma inhaler turns into an object with a very different recent history. Life-enhancer for some, the inhaler, once redundant, takes on another life as a travelling pipe for the urban crack addict. For Keith Coventry this is a departure from painting and from his previous large-scale work in bronze into a new, non-traditional material – cast plastic."

Still available from the publisher, here.

Keith Coventry | Inhaler

Keith Coventry
Inhaler
London, UK: The Multiple Store, 1998
7.5 x 3 x 4.2 cm
Cast plastic
Edition of 50, initialed and numbered copies (carved into the plastic)

A found asthma inhaler converted into a crack pipe is cast and rendered in plastic, to create an exact facsimile. Coventry also produced, in the same year, a series of bronze castings of other make-shift crack-pipes, mostly from water bottles (below).

Below: Inhaler as seen in the Donald Smith exhibition Ideal Home, alongside Robert Filliou's chess board (Optimistic Box #3), Barbara Kruger's coaster and Roy Lichtenstein's paper plate. 

Keith Coventry

Keith Coventry's White Abstract Painting Kit provides all the materials an aspiring artist would require to produce a masterpiece of pale monochromatic abstraction: an instruction booklet, bottle of poppy oil, tube of white oil paint, labeled bags of rabbit skin size and whiting, piece of sandpaper, brush, canvas board, segment of frame, fillet, linen sample, postcard of a Whitehall Guard, and transparency made from the postcard.

The boxed work is from a signed an numbered edition of 100 and was published by Ridinghouse Editions in London, in 1995.