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Local brand ZETR has collaborated with Australian artist Tom Adair to showcase how art and functional product design can work together to create something magnificent.
Functionality and good design are integrated into every element of ZETR’s approach to power outlets, switches and electrical fixtures. Its products are intended to power spaces without visual impact on their surrounds, allowing architectural and design details to take centre stage. The brand’s new campaign, Artist in Space, is taking this dedication to functional beauty one step further. ZETR is working with its favourite artists on a series of works that underscore creativity, space and illumination and which will be hung in ZETR’s HQ on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. For its first partnership, ZETR is collaborating with Australian artist Tom Adair.
Adair’s practice blends technology with art; he uses his signature airbrushing technique to depict outdoor scenes – coastlines, mountains and mid-century-modern houses – which are then made surreal with the use of neon lights and layers of LEDs. His work bridges the gap between human and machine, reflecting the impacts of technology on art and humankind. It’s also heavily influenced by his background in fashion and design, and the rule-breaking nature of his work reflects his beginnings in the graffiti subculture of the 1980s.
Finding a power supply that won’t distract from his artworks is paramount to Adair, and ZETR’s flush-against-the-wall outlets fit the bill, making him a perfect first choice for the Artist in Space series. Adair’s work proves that technology needn’t be separated from art – and indeed can be harnessed to imagine something exciting and new. This collaboration furthers that concept, attesting that the functionality of necessities such as power outlets needn’t be forfeited for beauty.
The pieces hanging the ZETR studio reflect how art and technology can become one. Adair’s signature CMYK dot paintings layer mid-century-style houses with boulders, cacti and background lighting to bring multidimensionality to the work, while retaining a sense of the surreal. In one piece, neon lights stripe horizontally and vertically across a triptych of the desert, highlighting the fusion of function and form – artworks as illumination.
Each piece is powered by ZETR’s minimal power outlets, including the Surface Double Outlet in white, which doesn’t distract from the art it works to illuminate. Nearby switches and faceplates – like the Surface 4 Gang Switch in white and the 3 Gang Faceplate Steel – also blend seamlessly into the background, allowing Adair’s pieces to remain the focus.
Ultimately, the collaboration between Adair and ZETR reflects the burgeoning relationship between technology, art and design, bringing to life the concept that electrical needn’t just be functional: it can be art in itself.
