MOD POP

Kamloops Printmakers

The Cube
January 17 to March 1, 2009

Responding to a retrospective of pop culture’s greatest practitioners poses an interesting problem for contemporary artists, and the Kamloops Printmakers have enthusiastically taken up the challenge in this group exhibition. If the Pop art movement of the 1950s and 60s was fuelled by a fascination with media and the proliferation of repetitive images in consumer advertising, then it is equally true that artists working in the first decade of the 21st century are no less affected by the culture of global mass media and marketing. We need look no further than our TVs, computer monitors and PDA devices to find an ever-deepening archive of images and sound bytes to serve as source materials. Just as Pop artists adapted and co-opted the bold graphic language of commercial print technologies of the mid-20th century, so today’s print artists increasingly choose commercially-driven digital processes and image manipulation and combine them with traditional print technologies to navigate the signs and symbols of our own time.