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Artist Dalia Shevin filled her gumball machine with teeny tiny thank you notes. -
Artist Dalia Shevin filled her gumball machine with teeny tiny thank you notes. -
Nik Perry of Sadie’s Bikes in Turners Falls with the three gumball machine he has in the store dispensing unusual items. He invites an artist to fill one of them with their creations on a rotating basis. -
People visiting the gumball machines at Sadie’s Bikes in Turners Falls.
Nik Perry is a lover of small plastic toys and wants to spread the love. He has placed gumball machines around Turners Falls that contain unusual prizes.
Perry began the project nine years ago when he filled up a gumball machine with plastic toys at his art show at the antique store Loot. Since then, the gumball machines have taken on a life of their own.
Perry has three gumball machines at his bicycle shop, Sadie’s Bikes (83 Canal Street), one at the Wagon Wheel (39 French King Hwy.) and one at The Upper Bend (112 Avenue A). He keeps them constantly filled with fun prizes for children and gumball machine lovers alike. He says his goal is to appreciate and repurpose “junk.”
“The stuff is everlasting, it doesn’t disintegrate, so why not uplift it again and again,” Perry said. “Someone made it, someone bought it and it went into a junk drawer, then it went to Salvation Army and now I have it. Someone else will get it and it will go in their junk drawer and hopefully another me will come along and think ‘Look at this thing.’”
Each capsule has a “magic component,” Perry said, explaining that there is a mystery to each prize.
The prizes follow many rules that Perry has self-imposed. All the prizes must be “worthful,” meaning they are usable as is (for example: charms will come on a necklace or keychain). There are no depictions of Native Americans, substances, weapons, army-related goods or religious objects. He called the gumball machines “a project with a conscience.”
Before living in Greenfield, Perry lived in Worchester and Providence, Rhode Island, where he became involved in groups of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or punk artists that often found ways to repurpose old objects into their art. One inspiration for his work is the Fort Thunder Arts Collective. This Providence-based collective existed from 1995 to 2001 and was filled with trash used as art.
“People would go to Salvation Army and buy every single one of their stuffed animals and sew them to a street pole. Now all of a sudden the things that were sitting moldering in a place are molding somewhere else but they are in the open and people can see it,” Perry said.
Perry was not the first to come up with this concept. There are many art vending machines throughout the country. Perry said he was influenced by old cigarette vending machines repurposed to be used for art. He said he is interested in the size and cost-constraint of the machine. It forces the artist to make each art piece small and cheaply.
Perry says that he collects action figures not because he likes a certain franchise but because he sees the beauty in the time and creativity it took to produce small mass-produced plastic objects. He loves to see how objects evolve or stay the same over time, and how some vary from piece to piece.
“There is too much everything in the world. Why not dig into these piles and see if there is anything usable. These piles can be on eBay or they can be literally a pile in the middle of the street,” Perry said.
One such group of objects Perry found in a pile in the middle of the street were pieces of a Mr. Potato Head. He then used them to create an unofficial mascot for himself. He liked his new creature so much that he made it into a sticker that he puts on the bikes he deems the coolest in his shop.
Since Perry reopened his bicycle shop, he opened his gumball machines project for other artists to join. He now hosts a monthly artist-in-residence art opening on the first Friday of every month in the shop. Each month, a new artist fills a machine with 200 pieces of original work. For many openings, the artists have diverted from the mission of reusing old stuff and instead provide small handcrafted pieces.
Pieces other artists have created include 3-D printed gems, pins, crochet “spooky friends” and freeze-dried Skittles. A Greenfield Community College art class will participate in the project next month and curate the machine that sits in the Upper Bend. The student’s art opening will take place Thursday, Dec. 14.
The art-in-residency program is booked out for the next year and a half.
“Most people will look at the prizes and say ‘whatever’. But I show it here with a little note that says ‘I’m Nik Perry and I thought this was important.’”