This artist's book by the American artist, musician (Destroy All
Monsters), writer and bookseller intertwines Polaroids of 1970s
Detroit with photographs of painterly
collages made of TV stills and print
ephemera combining Christian iconography, Classical Hollywood cinema, pop
and b-movie culture.
Polaroids by Cary Loren interleaves snapshots of his 1970s Detroit entourage with
photographs of his elaborately staged collage assemblages of prints, TV
stills, magazine covers, stickers, movie posters and other ephemera. The
Polaroid medium enables him to manipulate what are seemingly unrelated
visual idioms and image carriers in the development process by scratching
and pressing the emulsion and combining them into pictures of painterly
quality.
Loren's alchemy of works fuses personal with mythological elements, mixing
Christian iconography with icons of pop,
sci-fi/monster
and b-movie culture with the Golden Age of Hollywood as well as aesthetics
from trash magazine publications (
The National Enquirer,
Famous
Monsters of Filmland and
Screw) into a highly idiosyncratic
post-
Warholian pop cultism.
The Addams Family rubs shoulders with heavenly angels, as does the notions
of the grotesque morphing with the beautiful. It's Loren's reinterpretation
of Dante's
Inferno which is lined with the chaotic backdrop of
cupcakes and hearts. Loren ultimately creates ecstatic pictorial altars of
memento
mori, at once reverentially and irreverently indulging his obsession
with pop and trash culture, glamour, transience and death.
This artist's book includes an interview conducted by American artist
Cameron Jamie in cemeteries beside the graves of Loren's idols (including
Vampira, Ed Wood Jr, Jane Mansfield), where Loren's own life story is told
against the biographical background of those buried icons of pop culture.
The book comes with three different covers, randomly distributed.
Cary Loren (born 1955 in Detroit, lives and works in Oak Park, Michigan)
is an artist, musician and author. He is one of the founders of the
legendary
noise/rock band
Destroy All Monsters along with
Mike Kelley,
Jim Shaw and Niagara. His works are
included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum
of Modern Art in New York. As of 1982, he is co-owner of the book shop
Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan.
