Mod  Pop  Exhibition  Opening  Kamloops  Art  Gallery  January  17,  2009    In  the  spring  of  2009,  the  Kamloops  Printmakers  were  invited  to  mount  an  exhibition  of  our  prints  in  response  to  a  show  of  major  Pop  Art  works  that  was  visiting  the  Kamloops  Art  Gallery  from  the  Vancouver  Art  Gallery.    Responding  to  a  retrospective  of  pop  culture’s  greatest  practitioners  posed  an  interesting  problem  for  us  as  contemporary  artists,  and  the  Kamloops  Printmakers  enthusiastically  took  up  the  challenge  in  this  group  exhibition.        Just  as  the  Pop  art  movement  of  the  1950’s  and  60’s  was  fuelled  by  a  fascination  with  media  and  the  proliferation  of  repetitive  images  in  consumer  advertising,  so  artists  working  in  the  first  decade  of  the  21st  century  are  also  affected  by  the  cultures  of  global  mass  media  and  marketing.    We  need  look  no  further  than  our  TV  screens,  computer  monitors  and  cell  phones  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,  combined  with  traditional  print  technologies,  to  navigate  the  signs  and  symbols  of  our  own  time.      

 

Mod  Pop  exhibition  opening,  Kamloops  Art  Gallery,  January  2009.  

   

 Manny  and  Howard.  

 Instead  of  a  catalogue,  we  produced  post  cards  featuring  an  image  from  each  artist  (see  top  of  plinth).  

I