Samuel Parker: a solo show at Young Blood's newly opened location on North Highland. Amazingly, the gallery gets pretty silent once you take away the live DJ...
A multi-scene banner spanned the length of the wall, hanging just above Sam's smaller drawings. This "scene" alludes to the political philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulation.
This one, on the other hand, is sandwiched in between the adjacent scenes of "Fishes" and "Pigs." ...FIGHS!! ...Get it!?The caption here, in similarly ironic fashion, mentions another theorist of consumer society: Guy Debord, a founder of French Situationism. Does this add up?
Sam Parker, Too Holy May Not Enter.And what about the smaller drawings?
What are we trying to say?
*
4 comments:
That first small piece (in the nappy) reminds me of humpty-dumpty. And the hat - MLK? Elvis?
I'll check this out.
Is literally writing the word "Simulacra" a successful way to reference Baudrillard in an artwork?
Dunno, haven't seen it. But judging by your photos the layout of the show looks sharp.
Excellent question!
I'm not sure if it was Sam's goal to reference Baudrillard specifically... I think it was more about spilling the contents of his head onto paper.
But yeah, it was really curious to me that he chose to do it that way.
All the kings horses and all kings men couldn't put Humpty-dumpty back together again.
Yeah that whole 'being too literal' thing always comes up in my work. I see some of these larger scrolls more as an alternative formats to sketchbooking, working out of ideas. I see similarities between Debord's 'spectacle' and and Baudrillard's 'simulation'. I've not fully explored either of these these thinkers ideas but I am interested and continuing my investigation.
I also am interested in the 'dumbed-downess' of a lot of popular sequential art (comic books). How do I maintain a balance between presenting big ideas in that format without loosing any of its immediacy? I don't know the answer, but I keep trying. Thanks for your comments everyone and thank you Jeremy for writing about my work.
Post a Comment