Love Songs 2012
“Love Songs"; is about relationships as seen through the filter of pop culture. These works use collaged ephemera, such as romance novels, fifties pin ups, and men’s health magazines to explore society’s fantasies and fascination with romance. I’m interested in the way these pulp publications highlight society dreams of “the perfect partner”. An example of this would be the works “My Guy, Mary Wells” and “My Girl, The Temptations”. These works highlight the way media portrays the sexes with regard to love and romance. The sexes are given specific attributes that conform to societies stereotype. Male leads perpetuate the stereotype of the “knight in shining armor”, “the wealthy entrepreneur”, “the bad boy” and “the talented doctor” and tend to highlight a man’s ability to garner wealth or power. While female leads follow the stereotypes of “the demure lady in waiting”, “ the princess”, “the damsel in distress” and “the dutiful mother or wife” and promote the image of innocence, purity and helplessness.
On a formal level the works use abstract space as a tool to express the emotional state of romantic relationships. Harmony and dissonance in music is equated to the visual balance or discord can be created by competing patterns and colors. In the same way that different emotional cords of romantic partners create harmony or dissonance within the relationships. The images draw inspiration from astronomy and partial physics. Star clusters and celestial sky scraps are abstracted to represent the macro view of how society expects relationships to be, while abstractions of partials or atoms represent a more micro or personal perspective. Thus, creating constellations that act as a metaphor for the forces that attract or repel couples.