BOOM! An Explosive Art Project

And the artist behind these faux firecrackers is a devoted Inconspicuous Consumption reader!

(Photo courtesy of Thomas VanDyke Gallery)

When Scott Teplin was growing up outside of Milwaukee in the 1970s and ’80s, there were two things that had a particularly big influence on him. One was firecrackers; the other was Wacky Packages, the popular Topps trading cards and stickers that spoofed consumer culture by presenting playfully demented versions of popular brands and products.

Teplin grew up to become an artist (and an Inconspicuous Consumption reader!), and he’s now come up with an ingenious project that’s allowed him to combine his artistic prowess and his two childhood obsessions. He’s created a wide-ranging “product line” of playfully demented faux firecrackers, all produced by a fictitious pyrotechnics brand called Stupid Horse Fireworks. (“Vintage fireworks labels often featured noble animals as their branding, so I thought a goofy little horse would look funny and cool,” Teplin says.)

Now, if you know anything about firecrackers, you know that they have a very distinctive package design style, featuring bright red wrapping paper and bold, often cartoonish graphics. Filter that aesthetic through a Wacky Packages sensibility and you get “Homewrecker,” Teplin’s new art exhibition at the Thomas VanDyke Gallery in Brooklyn. (Teplin, it turns out, lives in Brooklyn, just a few neighborhoods over from me.)

If Teplin had simply done a bunch of paintings of bogus firecracker packages with funny brand names and goofy artwork, Wacky Packs–style, I’m sure that would’ve been plenty entertaining. But he’s gone way beyond that. He’s created actual packages of realistic-looking faux pyrotechnics, each one adorned with his artwork. Here are two sample packs that he sent me prior to the launch of the gallery show:

The packages contain inert objects, not actual firecrackers. But they’re very convincing!

While I enjoyed the sample packs, they didn’t fully prepare me for what I saw when I attended the exhibit’s opening reception last Saturday. Small artworks can be tricky to display effectively in a gallery setting (imagine a bunch of people crowded around a vitrine and squinting at a small pack of firecrackers), so I’d been wondering how Teplin planned to address that challenge. The answer turned out to be a spectacular display featuring dozens of his faux noisemakers in various shapes and configurations. I wasn’t able to capture the entire scope of the display, but you can at least get a sense of it in these two shots:

It’s a textbook case of what I like to call cumulative oomph — the total effect exceeding the sum of its parts.

From a distance, the display could pass as an assortment of real firecrackers. But when you take a closer look at Teplin’s artwork on the package labels, the gag starts to reveal itself:

I particularly like this next one — “Extinction” firecrackers, whose package design suggests that the product is explosive enough to have wiped out the dinosaurs:

There are also several larger specialty designs, which come with fuses:

The great thing about these, aside from the designs themselves, is that they seem just a small step removed from how a real fireworks company might market its products. It all seems nearly plausible.

And there’s more — a lot more. Here’s a slideshow with about two dozen additional photos I took at the reception (if you’d rather not deal with the video slideshow, you can also see those same photos here):

And get this: The Brooklyn gallery that’s exhibiting this work is located just a few blocks from where Topps was headquartered when they were producing Wacky Packages, a fun coincidence that Teplin is particularly happy about. Even better, thanks to the buzz that the project has already generated, a real life Chinese fireworks company has asked Teplin to design a vintage-style label for their 2027 product line. Life imitates art imitating life!

I should note here that the firecrackers comprise just half of this gallery show. The exhibit also has a separate room featuring a bunch of isometric renderings of what Teplin calls impossible rooms. These are interesting and often beautiful, but the little boy inside me was too captivated by the firecrackers to give these paintings the serious attention they probably deserved. Maybe they should get their own show, hint-hint.

You can decide for yourself by going to Thomas VanDyke Gallery (434 39th Street, Brooklyn), where Teplin’s work will remain on display through July 5th (the day after the biggest fireworks day of the year!). Definitely worth checking out if you’re in NYC. You can learn more about the show here, and you can learn more about Teplin’s work on his website.

This project pushes a lot of my buttons, so I would’ve been happy to write about it no matter who the artist was. But the fact that Scott Teplin is part of our Inconspicuous Consumption community is a very nice bonus — the cherry bomb on top, you might say.

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.