REVIEW:
Mark Dean Veca
Painting, Wall Drawings, and Collaborations
University Art Gallery, UCSD
By: Lara Bullock
Amidst Web 2.0 information overload, Mark Dean Veca’s phantasmagorical constructions are especially relevant, bubbling over with references to the likes of Popeye, the Doors, and Tinkerbell, while citing art-historical bigwigs such as Jeff Koons, R. Crumb, and Hokusai. The result is a cultural mash-up approximating a trippy Hanna-Barbera cartoon disco. Painting, Wall Drawings, and Collaborations, the first comprehensive overview of Veca’s work, is a particularly apt title for an exhibition containing ovular, cameo-like canvases, bedspreads, wallpaper, ceramics, Snowboarding Boots and Jackets For Nike (2009), and studies for site-specific installations, including a mural on the exterior walls of the gallery.
Veca’s art defies categorical constraints. Merging a graffiti ethos with that of illustration, infused with skater sensibility, L.A. custom culture, and Bay Area Underground comics, he frequently encompasses these tropes and pop-cultural icons within an ornate toile de Jouy aesthetic, giving them an incongruously aged patina. The toile de Jouy, an eighteenth-century design often featured on fabric, has been demoted to the wallpaper of choice for suburban homes across America and can thus be read as a metonym for the pop-cultural characters in Veca’s work.
At first glance the result is a visually pleasing and vibrant homogenization of Blues Brothers and Dr. Seuss in a world of flying phalli and labia. Yet — especially as the works’ terse titles fall short of their didactic function, and thereby provoke closer examination — these seemingly light-hearted subjects urge deeper reading. On closer inspection, menacing cloud-like figures (which Veca calls Grovelers) emerge from the work, suggesting that, despite the disorienting sex and whimsy, there are more serious underlying messages in the offing.
http://themagla.com/cgi-bin/artmagla/review.cgi?ReviewID=245
