Popular culture or “The Barber Board of Personality” allows us to pick and choose an archetype or personal style. In this search for ourselves, we adopt personality traits from the famous, the infamous and models, all presented to us in glorious technicolor, beautifully styled and lit on the pages of mass media.
Rummaging through the once “on trend, super influential” magazines of the nineties and early naughties, we are presented with pages and pages of bodiless model faces or once famous celebrities selling us a lifestyle, blatent sex or simply a new “improved” personality. These images inspired a generation to imitate these looks, to becoming more model-like, to become a “new me, a better me, a famous me”. A trend that still continues today.
With this exhibition of portraits, titled Angel, Killer, Cash or Queen, artist Alex Hamilton questions the responsibility of the imagemaker, the stylist, the art director, the editor who presents these fleeting celebrities and faux personalities to an insecure public, craving recognition and identity.
Like African barber boards, the paintings in Hamilton’s exhibition present us with the choice of who we want to be or personality traits we would like to adopt. Are you an Angel or a Queen? Do you choose Johnny Cash or the Killers? Pick your personality from the endless faces without bodies (and without heart or soul) on the pages of popular culture media and voila! You are a new person …
What: Angel, Killer, Cash or Queen – Alex Hamilton
Where and when: The Alex Hamilton Studio Gallery, 9 Barron Street, Woodstock from 13 November to 8 December 2017
Visit: https://www.facebook.com/AlexHamiltonStudioGallery/
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