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5x5: Five Artists / Five Perspectives Art Papers Jan/Feb 2006 page 54 By Phil Oppenheim Article Truncated... Eric Mack's collages, The Terreterrestrial Series, 2005, drew their sense of pattern and color from African sources, and their components from contemporary American culture. These were dizzying maps of imagined cities, exuberantly blending corporate logos, grid symbols, typographical snippets, space invaders, board game graphics, and expressionistic paint drips. Mack's cartography sang with musicality; sampled hipster icons (Pizzicato Five, Ninja Tune records) jockeyed industry text (Billboard chart positions) in pictures swirling with rhthmic eddies of movement and color. Interestingly, Mack enlisted white groups like The Police and Led Zeppelin instead of hip-hop and R& B artists to thwart our expectations of explicity musically inflected work by an African-American artist. Mack thus slyly critiqued the cultural prejudices of his audience, forcing us to confront the ways we think our artists ought to keep it real. |