From the Street to the Gallery: Jay Bubbles and the Price of Everything
What a memory of South African street vendors in the early 1990s reveals about consumerism, everyday objects and the value we assign to art.
The first time I saw these works by Jay Bubbles, I was transported to the streets of South Africa in the early 1990s.
I thought of street vendors selling combs to commuters on their way to work. The morning rush, people moving towards taxis, buses and trains, the brief exchanges between vendors and customers. Combs laid out for sale, prices displayed, everyday commerce unfolding in the spaces between home and work.
The prices in these works felt familiar. R15. R25. They belonged to a memory of a particular time, when these amounts made sense in the context of an ordinary purchase.
Before I began thinking about the art market, found objects or the relationship between commerce and value, I was remembering a street scene.
And that, perhaps, is where the work begins.
In this series, Jay Bubbles brings familiar grooming tools into the space of contemporary art, combining acrylic on canvas with found objects. Colourful combs sit against deep blue backgrounds, arranged with an apparent simplicity that draws the eye. Then we notice the handwritten prices, preserved within the compositions.
The combs are ordinary. The prices are familiar. The association is immediate.
But the longer we look, the more complicated the transaction becomes.
The price tag is part of the picture
A price label usually serves a practical purpose. It tells us what something costs so that we can decide whether to buy it.
We rarely stop to consider how quickly we respond to one.
We see a price, compare it with another, assess whether it seems reasonable and begin forming an opinion about value. These judgements are part of the everyday machinery of consumer life. We perform them almost automatically, often without consciously recognising the assumptions behind them.
In Jay Bubbles’ works, the handwritten prices are not external labels attached to the paintings. They are part of the compositions themselves.
The commercial language of buying and selling has entered the artwork.
This creates an intriguing tension. The combs remain recognisable as functional objects, but their presentation asks us to look at them differently. They have been removed from their everyday setting and incorporated into a painted surface, where colour, arrangement and material become part of the encounter.
Yet the price label continues to speak the language of commerce.
We are looking at art, but we are also reading a price. We begin to compare the objects, notice their differences and consider why one group carries a different amount from another.
Before we have decided what the work means, we have already begun to evaluate it.
We learn to compare before we learn to question
Consider the three titles in the series: Afro Combs — 15 each, Combs — 15 each and Combs — 25 each.
The differences are small, but they invite attention. The objects are grouped differently, the colours vary, and the handwritten prices encourage comparison.
Why do we instinctively want to know what accounts for the difference?
We might consider function, appearance, design or cultural context. We might wonder whether the price is justified. We might decide that one arrangement appeals to us more than another.
These are familiar consumer responses. We are accustomed to treating objects as things to be classified, compared and ranked.
Consumerism, however, is not only about the things we buy. It also shapes the way we look at things. It encourages us to assess, desire and assign value, often before we have considered what an object means beyond its place in a transaction.
Jay Bubbles’ paintings make this habit visible.
The handwritten prices offer no explanation. Instead, they create a situation in which we supply our own questions. We look for distinctions, construct reasons and begin deciding what matters.
The viewer becomes an active participant in the work’s conceptual tension.
When prices become memories
My association with the street vendors of the early 1990s adds another dimension to these paintings.
Prices are not timeless. They belong to particular economic circumstances, and they become markers of time in our memories. An amount that once felt ordinary can acquire a different significance years later.
The handwritten figures in Jay Bubbles’ work brought that earlier world to mind before I had consciously considered their relationship to the art market.
That personal recognition matters because it reminds us that objects carry associations beyond their practical uses. A comb can be a grooming tool, a product for sale, an element of a painting or a trigger for a memory of a particular street, city and moment in history.
The same object can occupy all these categories without losing its recognisable identity.
The prices do something similar. Within my memory, they belong to an everyday transaction. Within the painting, they become visual elements that connect the work to the language of commerce. For another viewer, they may prompt an entirely different association.
This is one of the pleasures of encountering art: a familiar object can lead us somewhere unexpected.
From the pavement to the gallery
There is a further irony in encountering these paintings through an art gallery.
The combs have moved from the world of everyday commerce into the world of contemporary art. The visual language of selling remains, but the object being offered to us has changed.
We are no longer considering whether to buy a comb. We are considering whether to collect an artwork that incorporates combs.
That distinction raises a question about value.
What are we paying for when we acquire art? The materials? The artist’s decisions? The transformation of familiar objects into a new composition? The experience of living with a work that continues to prompt thought long after the first encounter?
Of course, artworks have material, creative and commercial value. Collectors are entitled to consider price, quality, authorship and the place a work might occupy in their lives.
But value is not always as straightforward as a number on a label suggests.
The market can assign a price to an object, but the meaning we find in it may be personal, cultural, emotional or intellectual. Those dimensions do not always fit neatly into a transaction.
By bringing handwritten prices into the paintings, Jay Bubbles creates a meeting point between these different ways of looking.
The work does not need to reject commerce to make us question it. Instead, it uses the familiar language of commerce to draw attention to the assumptions we bring with us.
What happens when the object becomes art?
Artists have long explored the relationship between everyday objects and art, challenging the idea that artistic significance depends entirely on what a material is or how it was originally used.
Jay Bubbles’ approach begins with objects that need no introduction. We know what combs are. We understand their purpose. We recognise the colours, the shapes and the arrangements.
The found objects retain their everyday character, while the acrylic-painted canvas gives them a new context. The handwritten prices add another layer, drawing the visual logic of the marketplace into the composition.
Nothing needs to be concealed for the work to operate. The combs remain combs, and the prices remain legible.
Yet the combination changes our encounter with both.
This is where the work’s accessibility becomes its strength. We do not need specialist knowledge to enter the conversation. We need only to recognise the objects and notice our response to them.
The conceptual question arrives through an ordinary experience: looking at things and deciding what they are worth.
Are we questioning consumerism, or participating in it?
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this series is that it does not leave the viewer comfortably outside the subject.
We can stand in front of the paintings and critique consumer culture. We can discuss the relationship between money and meaning, or the way prices influence perception.
But we have also compared the combs. We have read the labels. We have looked for differences and tried to understand the amounts.
We have participated in the very process we are examining.
That does not necessarily mean we have been caught out. It means the work has made an everyday habit available for reflection.
The paintings create a pause in a process that usually happens too quickly to notice. We move from recognising an object to evaluating it, and then from evaluating it to asking why we made that judgement.
The street vendor returns to mind. The gallery comes into view. The price remains between them.
Perhaps the question is not simply what the combs are worth.
Perhaps it is how we learned to decide.
And perhaps the most revealing thing about a price tag is not the amount written on it, but what happens in our minds when we read it.
Discover Jay Bubbles at Unsung Art
Jay Bubbles creates mixed-media works combining acrylic on canvas with found objects. In this series, familiar combs and handwritten prices become the starting point for a conversation about memory, consumer behaviour and the value we assign to everyday things.
Explore the works:
- Afro Combs — 15 each
- Combs — 15 each
- Combs — 25 each
Each original artwork is available for R1,100.
Discover the collection through Unsung Art.
Unsung Art — contemporary art that invites you to look again.