Schaefer
is a local artist and musician and has been working on his Pop Art series for
about a year. Though his work hearkens back in many ways to the 1960s,
Schaefer’s process is surprisingly technical and twenty-first century.
“I draw
small images with brush and India ink,” explains Schaefer. “I take a photo of
the completed image with my cell phone and email it to Hersh Jacob.” Jacob is
the owner of Studio 22. Jacob then alters the image via computer, fiddling with
texture and colour, before emailing the image back to Schaefer. “I reproduce by
hand several iterations of the image,” Schaefer goes on. Jacob then makes
glycee prints and sends other images off for silkscreen printing.
Sound
complicated? The simplicity behind Schaefer’s graphic tulips and cows belies
the inordinately technical process. Most of Schaefer’s work is a progression of
recurring images with variations: red, yellow, blue; small, larger, largest.
The seriality of his work is as much a comment on the convolutedness of
production as on the retro commercialization of art. Or, perhaps more
accurately, Art.
But
Schaefer is certainly having fun while he’s at it. The pièce de resistance of
his exhibit is the ubiquitous pointing finger. Available on buttons, on
postcards, and on prints, the pointing finger of varying hues is everywhere in
the collection. The endless fingers cheekily implicate us, the viewers. “I’m
often a bad machine,” says Schaefer of his attempts to make his works of art as
uniform and precise as possible. With Schaefer pointing so many fingers (quite
literally) at us, I suppose I should consider my own uniformity, my deference
to commercialism, my endless use of technology, my own – as it were –
machinery.
Then
again, maybe Schaefer is just giving us all the finger.
The Pop
Art series runs at Studio 22 between August 17th and September 15th. - See more
at:
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