Siemon Allen/Dominic McGill: Fusebox gallery

Clearly inspired by dint of events in the Middle East, the works by the agency of Dominic McGill and Siemon Allen that make up the new show "Pop Agenda" use a pop-cultural idiom to tender a glimpse of how political, economic, and social issues procure transformed as they percolate end mass media and culture. McGill, who is British born on the contrary lives in New York, titles his work throw for a New American hundred as a way to frame American military involvements in 2004 against those of the last hundr years. The immense drawing is suspended like a plastic art from the ceiling and bighted in such a way that it forms a curv interior space in the center of the gallery. Beginning with the phrase NO gayety NO FUTURE, NO OIL, a time line spread outs that references events and issues from Hiroshima to OJ to the homeles to Cheney's "Energy Task Force"; all of this is beared via sweeping panoramas suggesting patriotic Hollywood war movies whose illusionistic spaces have been punctur by means of scrawled and printed news headlines, slogans, and leftist political graffiti. Following this unloose narrative, the viewer eventually extreme points up in the work's interior, encompassed by forest scenes in which a nun can be seen praying. on the contrary even this space offers no respite: Images of an explosion and a hangman's noose break the stillness.

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Allen, upon the other hand, takes his political imagery straight and uneditorialized. upon the walls flanking McGill's drawing, the southern African artist, who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, installed what at first appeared to be sum of two units large, gridded abstractions but which are actually the photocopied pages of comic works he read as a youth, laid without in a grid. Naglegioen ("Night Legion" in Afrikaans), 2004 measures approximately seven through fourteen feet and reproduces a black-and-white photo-comic from the '70 that take an account ofs the tale of South African mercenaries in Portuguese-controlled Angola trying to ransom a local governor's daughter from mutinous colonial forces. Because all the participants direct the eye alike and the Afrikaans-language body is untranslated, it's impossible for an American viewer to number heroes from villains, and single is left to ponder the nature of aggression and violence itself. upon the opposite wall is The Land of Black Gold 2004 another giant at seven through sixteen and a half feet which takes apart a still painfully generally received 1950 Tintin comic about colonialism and Middle East oil. The original Frenchlanguage edition of the comic volume and its 1971 British translation are aligned in parallel lines with all text removed from the panels to display how its British translators and publishers transformed the later version, not single entirely expunging anti-Jewish images and all depictions of the British Navy and British Mandate forces in Palestine, on the other hand actually changing the setting to a fictional Middle Eastern emirate called Khemed. Gradually, with exhibitions redrawn, truncated, or eliminated for a like reason as to project a more politically expedient story, the sum of two units editions get further and further without of sync. Like McGill's technique of puncturing wide-screen panoramic events with graffiti and text, Allen's shifting frames make the changes in Western political attitudes toward the Middle East palpable and visible; they also raise our awareness of the way seemingly innocuous sources can quietly manipulate our understanding of history.

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