Master of the New Idea (Actual Size) by Jim Drain is a giclée print with screen printed spot varnish of the iconic New Balance sneaker. The shoe takes the place of a Picasso painting on the cover of a 1993 publication from Abrams Books tracing the life of the artist. The wobbly depicted neon sneaker stands erect against a neutral ground and contained in the image of a publication. On the significance of the New Balance sneakers, Drain writes “if you had to wear a sneaker into battle, I’d wear New Balance. They are the Emeco of shoes. They could be government issued. They are Bert and Ernie of design. Imagine Big Bird looking at a Picasso. Would he daydream of a New Balance? Would Bert wear ones with velcro straps? Master of the orthopedic. What if Design became an algorithm that gave out the wrong answer? Orange you glad?”
Jim Drain (b. 1975 in Cleveland, Ohio) is a multimedia artist who was a member of Forcefield, a collective which explored the merging of music, performance, film, and installation. Forcefield was active from 1996 until 2002 and was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Drain’s saturated psychedelic patterned works use machine knit patterns in combination with unconventional objects such as fun-house mirrors, plastic easter eggs, and printed ephemera. Drain’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
