Exhibitions > Instructions Not Included

Adulthood is considered by many to be an inflexible point on a timeline which, once reached, is definite and identifying. Instructions Not Included challenges this assumption, instead establishing a space where the boundaries of age and social expectation might evolve anew or dissolve entirely.
Paul Shortt’s work is an investigation into how both authority and social norms shape our actions, self-perceptions and interactions with others, particularly as we experience adulthood. Encouraging viewers to shed the heavy weight of others’ expectations, Shortt playfully criticizes both the policing of behavior in public spaces and the manufactured performance of adulthood with the familiar visual language of signage.
Through the use of bold color, stimulating two-dimensional textures and playful design, the artist transforms an everyday part of the institutional landscape into a metaphor for the enduring presence of authority and social control.
By modeling and demanding a return to a childlike state Shortt plays with our cultural conception of adulthood and the rules, roles and expectations accompanying it, encouraging us to exist honestly and openly in a world which often pressures us to be what others think we should be.
Instructions Not Included asks: Can we find autonomy not by discarding the messages around us but by confronting, reframing, and perhaps even playing with them? The viewer becomes both observer and participant, invited to explore how freedom might be found, not in the absence of limits, but in how we choose to engage with them.