- Where: Wonder Fair: Art Gallery & How!, 803 Mass. St., Lawrence
- Cost: Free
- Age limit: All ages
- Ongoing: Until Thursday, July 24, 2008
Description
From the artist: "Spectacular World" is a tribute to our own world. A choice to celebrate the things that don't typically merit celebration. In the sixties, Guy Debord and the Situationists presented the idea of the spectacle as a top down agenda planted in a passive population to keep them working, buying, and distracted. But now those seeds have grown and taken roots, this has become our culture. For example, I learned to speak from cartoons, and "Like a Virgin" gave me religion. We may have been given the cursed goods of industrialization, but we continue to choose them. We choose it; the car, the job, the streets... so they must be good and they must be ours. When we recognize them as impostors, they possess a new kind of power, one that is not oppressive but silly.
I use a basic mixed media approach, but i think of them as drawings in the way that nothing is built just placed; shapes are funny but powerful. Everyday we are shown many superfluous things which can be beautiful, and I try to incorporate that into each piece. The work comes from the question "is doing something frivolous like buying a t-shirt an empty or powerful act? and is doing something toxic like eating fast food, or polluting make you a victim, or a villain? Should I fear french fries and terrorists or should I eat them?"
Posted June 19, 2008 and Last updated June 19, 2008