Next Generation Exhibition
Cartoons and popculture by new generation of artists
Loud DJ spun music set the tone for an exhibition with its feet set firmly in popular culture. The strong influence of cartoons and magazines manifested itself in pulpy stylized images while the towers of television sets on entry suggested where today’s artists encounter much of their visual stimulation.
Linnia Strid's Juxtaposicion and Derek Gore's Yes Please, both incorporating newspaper clippings into their imagery, clearly follow on from the New Contemporary Art movement that began on the West Coast of America in the 70s and evolved from surrealist, comic book and illustrative scenes.
Between the sparseness of the venue and the obvious influence of street art there was an atmosphere of industry and urbanity however many of the images were of a romanticized natural world, giving the sense of an imagined escape from the city.
The idea of escapism was a theme in much of the works which employed the images of dreams, fantasy and fairytale, like Timothy Karpinski's Meet me on the Moon. The muted blues and fantastical framing creates a kind of simplicity that is deceptively difficult to achieve and exudes a naive charm. In contrast, David Macdowell's And God Created Sugar is populated by seaside-resort-style buxom women, brashly coloured and grotesquely exaggerated. Cascades of eerily separated breasts tumble in piles and many familiar faces, like Bugs Bunny, smile disconcertingly out of the frame.
The tension between innocence and indecency echoes a theme of conflict in the exhibition – artists looking for meaning in a world in which information is a barrage and yet where the natural world remains distant and fantastical. The feeling of disorientation is probably most succinctly summed up in Jacub Gagnon's Are You My Mother, in which a small bird, on breaking out of a Russian doll looks at the largest doll with a longing for belonging. Like the bird, perhaps the art is showing how we are struggling to reconcile our natural selves with the urban world we fear but fear to escape.
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