Inc. Magazine #3 ‘Keeping Up With the Wuppies’ 1995

Curator: This drawing, brought to us by Jack Davis in 1995, is titled "Inc. Magazine #3 ‘Keeping Up With the Wuppies’." It seems to be created with pen and ink. My first thought is that it’s quite frantic! Editor: Indeed! It certainly evokes a sense of the harried, the caricatured anxiety of modern life perhaps? Note the woman checking her oversized wristwatch— a symbolic weight bearing down upon her, underscoring time poverty and cultural pressures. Curator: There’s something incredibly potent about the juxtaposition of images here. The thought bubble showing the kids in peril – the threat of a tornado – set against the backdrop of, well, the mundane nightmare of shopping with a troublesome Wuppie, or rather its paw being inspected by a cashier with… unusual attentiveness. Editor: The artist is using symbols and cultural references here quite masterfully, really. The storm stands in for the challenges, the instability many families were facing perhaps in 1995—a sense of societal anxiety rendered in the home front's microcosm. And what about this odd puppet-dog! Its unsettling charm reflects both the hyper-consumerism of pet culture. This is consumerist anxiety played out in real time. Curator: Do you think so? I see the tornado perhaps, as symbolizing something slightly more eternal in human consciousness – our precarious place in the face of nature, our helplessness and lack of control. But that tension is of course beautifully rendered against the mundane. Editor: It strikes me that by positioning the parents’ frantic attempt to control events with an awareness of these wider societal concerns, the drawing encourages the viewer to contemplate questions surrounding community and collective obligation. The personal anxieties we can control, like how long we’ll take in a queue or at the shops with unruly pet Wuppies versus the societal events impacting families on the farm—how often we truly attend to the challenges within our families. Curator: Interesting – perhaps the 'Wuppies,' though fictional, are themselves an emblem, a modern form of talisman that signifies an anxiety but equally promises domestic ease? And in both, there's an acknowledgment of unseen dangers, too: for them, real dangers from natural disaster or…for others, the symbolic risk from modern living! It's truly interesting. Editor: And what's clear, despite my analysis, is that good illustration allows for individual subjective insights on all matters! Jack Davis achieves that masterfully with 'Keeping Up with the Wuppies'!