The Collection includes a new HUGE piece by MICHAEL THRUSH.
"WOMEN - ARE YOU READY?"
ARTIST'S STATEMENT: "Advertising and commercial imagery are presented to us everyday. As it permeates our environment, it becomes a greater part of our culture and lives. The relationship I have to popular culture is an examination into how mass media use imagery to alter the viewer’s mindset. In advertising, they promote a consumer response or belief along with a product. In the past, the belief of ‘quality’ and ‘reliability’ were sold as worry-free declarations as a means to convince the consumer into a sale. If you see it or not, there are subliminal messages behind all images and text. Today, advertisers are not settling for how their product benefits the consumer’s quality of life. Their product message relates much more to a way of being or to attaining a desirable life style of the "American Dream". This evolving language of pop culture feeds off of our desires, needs, fears, and fantasies to allure the viewer into a way of thinking.
I see contemporary pop culture subversively affecting our belief structures. In many ways, I feel programmed by the forcefulness of media emphasizing sex as a prime motivator and trying to reach some advertiser's idea of lifestyle. I believe the influence of the media contributes to an individual’s social development. My appropriation of pop iconography focuses on this aspect of social programming. There is a need to ‘read between the lines’ of what an image means and says to understand any socially coded message. In my work, I reinterpret images out of their context as a means to gain authority of the pop image and redirect what their intent will be. Then I choreograph specific imagery into a social commentary.
The narrative dialog retranslates the language of symbols, signs, images, and text to read as a multi-faceted allegory providing alternative meanings through the framework of free association. I look to the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics of images, Jacque Derrida’s deconstruction of language, and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic views on sexuality in relation to pop culture to inform my methodology."
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