Paper Bag
1968

During the 1960s, Alex Hay made deadpan, over-scaled copies of disposable objects like a cash register slip, a page from a yellow legal note pad, toilet paper, and a paper airplane. Standing at nearly 5 feet, Paper Bag is an enlarged rendering of its diminutive source. Hay coated the sculpture’s paper skeleton with fiberglass, epoxy, resin, and paint to achieve a rigid surface and thoroughly realistic appearance, which features wrinkles, tears, saw-tooth edges, and a brand insignia. In Paper Bag, as in all of Hay’s large-scale sculptures of everyday items, the artist’s labor-intensive process stands in deliberate contrast to the ubiquity and unimportance of the throwaway objects he depicts so precisely.