Brut Pop

Exhibition: December 15 to February 9, 2006
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 1 PM to 5 PM
Opening Reception: Friday, December 15 -
7 to 10 PM
Mid-Show Reception: Friday, January 19 –
6 to 9 PM
Closing Reception: Friday February 9 –
7 to 10 PM		 debbie vasquez painting
Click to see the ARTWORK HERE

BRUT POP

Brut Pop at Reversible Eye opens December 15, 2006 and runs for two months. Reversible Eye is known for bringing diverse elements and cultures together, showing a variety of styles and backgrounds within a common theme.

For this exhibition, the works of five untrained, outsider artists from Arts of Life studio in Chicago were chosen because of their unique stylistic combinations and juxtapositions. This exhibition contains works that are both cute and disturbing, beautiful and frightening, colorful yet restrictive, reckless but methodical, and sacred and banal.

We’ve chosen Brut Pop as the title of this exhibition because the contradictions of the terms Brut and Pop are indicative of the incongruous forces that have come together to create the appeal of this work. While Art Brut normally refers to art made outside the bounds of official culture1, Pop Art embraces the most banal or kitschy parts of any culture.2

The artwork collected in this show is unique in the artists’ situation of being outside of mainstream culture in the common cultural areas of schooling, housing, and work, yet always absorbing and communicating back their inspiration and ideas that stem from mainstream culture.

Silvia Ramirez references cartoon and television figures taken from magazines, advertisements, comic books, and greeting cards, painting them in
a large scale on wood panels. The elements of the image that get altered in her translation make for unfamiliar new views of everyday icons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arts_of_life/sets/72157594392052603/


Debbie Vasquez’s decorative abstracts are painted with such an urgent hand that her repetitive elements change and shift, making each part of her composition different and active.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arts_of_life/sets/72157594204380816/

 Lakesha Jackson’s brightly colored drawings use the imagery of children’s art. However, her bulbous trees, multi-colored houses, and child-like figures are drawn from an adult’s perspective and carry experience and emotion that rings out through the sharpie and marker-made children’s scenes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arts_of_life/sets/72157594352666254/

Mark Germanos builds monolithic structures on his canvases and boards out of quickly drawn lines and very slowly applied paint. He paints in installments, selecting his bright colors and adding another subdivision to his architecture one piece at a time. Seen from a distance as whimsical, upon closer inspection his paintings show themselves to be very carefully carved-out constructions. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arts_of_life/sets/72157594204625359/

Veronica “Ronnie” Cuculich creates multi-colored mandalas centered around supermodels cut from Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other fashion magazines. The swirling lines and patterns lead to the most interesting part of the picture, the alterations she makes on the magazine models with marker and oil pastel. Noses are re-drawn, eyes change color, and features are obscured or re-imagined. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arts_of_life/sets/72157594207383400/

Ronnie founded the Arts of Life studio in 2000 with co-founder and executive director, Denise Fisher and another untrained artist who worked with Ronnie in her residential setting. 

 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Brut

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_Art

Arts of Life is a non-profit art studio for artists who have developmental disabilities. The studio’s mission is to provide adults with developmental disabilities an environment to experience personal growth. 

To learn more about Arts of Life, visit their website at www.artsoflife.org