Pockets Full of Poises
Pockets Full of Poises
Robert Clifton
The series “Pockets Full of Poises” experiments with the appropriation of mass produced cultural images. an icon such as Mickey Mouse has entered the collective unconscious and become the staple food of the Western imagination in the realm of popular culture. The series, therefore, visualizes the fascination with and impact on what can be called “dead pictographs”. The force of those dead, almost banal images stems from their intricate net of violent connotations, sexual fantasies, mass produced and repeated desires they contain and engender.
By extrapolating both the psychological and political impact of overused icons, the grotesque elements within their various configurations can be revealed or thrown into relief. In this way, multiple dialogues surface through the series; history communicates the presence, and the future, contained in the incessant repetition of the icon, exposes the ugly and yet seductive face of the past.
On one hand, the exhibition echoes both the notorious McCarthy era of the 1940’s and nursery rhymes composed in the medieval ages, chronicling peoples efforts to ward off the plague. On the other hand, the series ironies mainstream US-American pop art and plays with its ideological subtexts. Yet the paintings also strive to go beyond postmodern experiments of irony. Taking a fundamental 20th Century icon to point of its disappearance, the paintings visualize the necessity for a critical social re-evaluation of cultural symbols. The ideological entrenchment’s of the icon is dramatically visualized through the tabloid backgrounds of the paintings.
The thematic perspectives of the pieces are further enhanced by a combination of traditional and non-traditional visual genres. Industrial printing meets photography and painting. The use of different media plays with the ambivalences of form and content, with the loss of originality of theme and technique. In this way, the perfection of the print medium contrast the violent content of the images that they produce.