Thomas Kinkade, Disney, and NASCAR
The world lost Thomas Kinkade more than a week ago, an artist whose importance during his life was measured by product placement and marketing prowess. Kinkade’s work always fascinated me, not because his formulaic shuffle of cottages, lighthouses and waterfall gardens appealed to my taste, but because he seemed like a conflicted character. Many remember [...]
FOCUS: KAWS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Brooklyn artist KAWS hurls the onlooker into a cartoon’s daytime nightmare with effectively targeted film and television favorites, calling forth a sense of the unexpected that is fun and funny but also disturbing and super-creepy. You might call it macabre (which is a pretentious word, like pescetarian). KAWS (whose real name is Brian Donnelly) developed his style [...]
Post Pop Punks at Cohn Drennan Contemporary
Post Pop Punks proffers many stops in its pop culture parade/group program which, according to the press release, “incorporates popular cultural references, utilizes appropriation, co-opts historical icons, (and) exploits the annals of art history.” And then there’s Adult Swim. Behavior modification for cartoon characters emerges as the latest thing in thematic creativity. For Buzz Lightyear, [...]
David Shelton: Kelly O’Connor’s “Post-Utopia”
Somewhere between childhood wonder and adult disillusionment, Kelly O’Connor is creating a psychic landscape from fragments of familiar movies, TV shows, vacationlands and fairy tales. While she’s been making the collages mined from her childhood pop culture for years, O’Connor’s “Post-Utopia” show at the David Shelton Gallery seems more intimate and introspective, inspired by a [...]
Michael Bise
Glasstire audio slide show profiling Michael Bise. The artist talks about drawing from old movies, Disney vs. religion and why art should be hard.