Carey Young

Product Recall

Product Recall by Carey Young is a video performative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual. The psychoanalyst opens the discussion by asking her how she feels. The exchange turns into a game of questions and answers whence the psychoanalysis asks Young to guess the corporations of the slogans that he recites, which many refer to sport corporation branding of “inspiration” and “imagination”. In Young’s failure to recall many brands, the audience is urged to question whether the psychoanalysis’s task is for Young to recall or forget the slogans. Through demonstrating that while branding is forgettable, the artist nonetheless highlights the omnipresence and power of multinationals in the landscape of our society. In the style of a documentary, this fictitious video performance is an unscripted play on subconscious memory and conscious intellectual emancipation. Young’s “Product Recall” is a shrewd and challenging analysis of collective and individual memory in the face of corporate oppression.