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Strange ReprisePost an Event »
state
December 10 - January 28, 2017Info
- http://www.statespacesf.com/
- 4153050830
Maria Forde: "The Ballad of Cable Hogue", 2016, Drawing, 9” x 12”
state presents Strange Reprise, an exhibition of work by San Francisco Bay Area artists Maria Forde and Chris Thorson. Strange Reprise examines the artistic production of two artists who engage with the history of popular culture and its potential to shape personal and cultural identities. Forde’s newest collection of drawings examine the Hollywood tradition of Westerns and the way they have captured the collective imagination of multiple generations. Focusing mostly on American Westerns and their uncomfortable tropes -- masculine and feminine binaries, Manifest Destiny and Native Americans as savages -- they provide the viewer with a new opportunity to look at the construction of identity, the stories we are fed to make order out of chaos, and the way we seek to make sense of our place in the world. Thorson’s presents a collection of cast and painted urethane sculptures that represents a cache of found sticker albums circa 1980. Under a critical gaze, the stickers of cartoon characters and pop icons shed their innocence, revealing allegiance with consumerism, narcissism, racism and patriarchy. Strange Reprise brings these bodies of work together to consider the seemingly benign seepage of popular culture into the collective consciousness, specifically the young, impressionable minds of youth. How does a sticker book or an old movie on TV shape us? How do we grow up to recognize and untangle ourselves from the things we were once drawn to but didn’t fully understand?