HYPE 2012

Curator: This strikingly unsettling image is titled "HYPE," created by Dave Macdowell in 2012 using mixed media. What's your initial read on this? Editor: It’s visually loud, almost aggressively so. The textures are slick and glossy, contrasting sharply with the gritty subject matter. Feels intentionally designed to provoke. Curator: Absolutely. The work tackles the politics of image and deception, doesn't it? Macdowell is making a potent commentary on the spectacle of political power. Obama's portrait is split; half-human, half-machine. This suggests ideas of control, the manipulation of identity and the perceived divide between image and reality in political figures. The title “HYPE” itself indicates a critique of media manipulation. Editor: Agreed. I see this reflected materially in the use of mixed media—acrylic and possibly digital elements combined to create this high-impact image. This piece exemplifies the use of art to unearth cultural undercurrents by highlighting our social dependence on hyperbole, revealing how contemporary systems manufacture narratives, even through the material choices in making art. What are your thoughts on the artist's appropriation of such loaded imagery? Curator: Well, there's an unmistakable layer of caricature, and this is precisely the point. The visual rhetoric around leaders is often larger than life; the rockets, the nuclear symbols, the literal money bags— they play into fears while illustrating how symbols themselves become tools. Editor: It is hard to ignore the masonic symbolism and 1% depicted in the image which may symbolize something even larger than our reliance on political figures as we know them to be, but potentially rather what the political infrastructure really is. The almost dripping effect around Obama, reminds me a bit of the materials often being corrosive in nature when the environment it relies on deteriorates or becomes toxic to those surrounding. It speaks of excess and toxicity, and our collective addiction to spectacle at the cost of material truths. Curator: I think ultimately, Macdowell prompts us to interrogate the structures of power at play. It shows how our perception of those in charge can be engineered for specific effect, it definitely doesn't let us off the hook either! Editor: Agreed, it shows the layers of fabrication present within what we perceive and manufacture as power. This painting reveals art as an action and reflection within an economy that increasingly values production over sustainable creation and genuine value.