Currently at Peg Powler Gallery at Green Dragon Studios, we have the world's first exhibition of 'clip art' - the free illustrations that come with word processing software etc. Our reasoning behind this show was initially for a laugh, but it has also become part of an ongoing interest in the aesthetics of a period when computers became common in the home, office and school but before the rise of the internet. This was a time when unless you had all the latest graphics cards etc to play games, the way to get some fun out of a machine primarily made for spread sheets and writing documents was through things like minesweeper, MS Paint and the clip art. The drawings, which appeared in flyers, posters and newsletters and presentations across the world, are funny, familiar, sometimes strange. All created by anonymous artists, they represent a modern form of pop art, considered disposable and utilitarian. This show shines a focus on clip art in the way that in the 50s Eduardo Paolozzi drew attention to the film posters and comics considered detritus by most people. Now superseded by the likes of Google images, clip art belongs to a genre of PC imagery that can now be seen as drawing to a close and viewed in retrospect, embodying many cultural indicators of the time they were created for.
And now here's me in a funny hat pretending I painted all the pictures:
The show is still on for a bit, viewing by appointment (email info@pegpowler.com) or for anyone using Green Dragon Studios (why not form a band for this reason alone?)
0 comments:
Post a Comment