Daisy Delaney's Dreams of Desire are realised in solo exhibition at London's Payne Shurvell

Exhibition: Daisy Delaney – Dreams of Desire, Payne Shurvell, London, September 8-11 2010

A till receipt, says Daisy Delaney, is an object “so familiar, banal and everyday that we forget its existence”. The young artist gives the by-products both a more serious and playful allure, turning the “happy accident” of their lists into “a record of the fact that the artist controlled the precise order in which the items were scanned through the checkout.”

She integrates hidden messages into each receipt, spelling out the word shark on a Saatchi Gallery one (formed by items including Art Monthly and a Scott King postcard, in case you were wondering) to turn, as she coins it, purchase into performance, with cashiers cast as her anonymous accomplices.

The audience is ultimately positioned as the third party in this sequence, as the receipts we see as art disappear before our greedy eyes, becoming nothing more than memories and ephemera.

Her accompanying works, a pair of street-racing cars, are a bit less subtle. Created for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial and parked outside the gallery for the duration of this show, they continue a tradition of artists reimagining cars, from Martini’s “hippie” Racing Porche, in 1971, to the BMW Art Car Project in 1975, which enticed the likes of Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer to try out bonnet designs.



Admission free. Open 11am-6pm Thursday-Saturday (6pm-8pm Wednesday). Visit www.payneshurvell.com or call 020 0011 4115.