Wherever you land on the love-hate spectrum of pop music, its melodic pull is difficult to withstand. Regardless of its crucial repute of being performative, overly honest and, at occasions, all an excessive amount of, it’s a style that’s at all times lived on a knife’s edge — one which thrives not regardless of its many contradictions, however due to them.
At P·P·O·W Gallery‘s newest group present, Hope is a harmful factor pulls again the shiny curtain of pop curtain and revels in its darker, extra introspective underbelly. Impressed by the closing observe of Lana Del Rey‘s 2019 studio album Norman F*cking Rockwell, the exhibition attracts inspiration from the album as an elegiac portrait of millennial youth, late-stage capitalism and the unusual calm that generally follows despair.
Curated by Eden Deering, the present assembles a fantasy band, composed of Kyle Dunn, Raque Ford, Paul Kopkau, Diane Severin Nguyen, Kayode Ojo, Marianna Simnett and Robin F. Williams — an “artist Spice Ladies” of types, every channelling their very own pop persona. Collectively, the works on view wrestle with the customarily conflicting tensions and dualities that form our understanding of the cryptic but ever-present determine that’s the trendy pop star.
Channelling early 2000’s optimism and digitally-wrought melancholy in equal measure, a shared reverence for camp, authenticity and the braveness of self-reinvention pulse via the area. Williams’ glow-in-the-dark “Siri Serving” captures an unreachable vocalist mid-serenade, suspended someplace between presence and phantasm. In Dunn’s “Happiness is a butterfly,” which figures Del Rey’s album in its foreground, tells the story of a glass star whose longing to be lovely is sobered by the stark, unglamorous actuality encasing it.
Past pop music itself, a number of works faucet right into a broader sense of cultural nostalgia: for “Within the Ocean, In Da Membership, and In my Goals,” Ford inscribes a failed Rihanna-Beyoncé fan fiction throughout luminous sculptural varieties, whereas Ojo’s standout sculptures discover the seduction of quick style and disposability — all that glitters just isn’t gold.
Hope is a harmful factor embraces the contradictions at pop’s coronary heart: the delusion that magnificence, or the phantasm of such, can save us, and the hope that perhaps, simply perhaps, it nonetheless would possibly. As Deering described, the present walks “the road between religion, hope and dream. There’s a resilience to simply maintain going and there’s one thing so lovely about it.”
The exhibition is now on view via July 11.
P·P·O·W Gallery
392 Broadway,
New York, NY 10013
