Tracing the Melbourne artist’s photorealist graphite renderings of fruit, foliage and figure, Mad Deep Thoughts captures Payne’s technical acumen and offbeat humour to equal effect.

Comprising uncanny accumulations and pairings of classical forms and Google image search results, Payne’s fastidiously realised drawings might be considered in terms of collage. Banana bunches and cigarette-smoking carrot men coalesce, while a neon hot dog perches before Antonio Canova’s Sleeping Nymph. Art history and the absurd knock heads, as do the labour of technique and the flippancy of the one-liner.

But these works are reflections on our hilarious and slightly disturbing state of affairs as much as they are gags. Payne’s works capture and wrangle the vaguely biographical images, texts and details we not only release, but also actively flaunt, in the increasingly pervasive public domain. That he creates these tableaux via such laborious consideration and methodology works to distil and crystallise the waves of space junk, at least for a moment.