Breaking the Law

Impressionists such as Van Gogh, Monet, and Renoir found inspiration in the countryside. Andy Warhol and members of the Pop Art movement subverted celebrity and product images to create a witty homage to a consumerist society. What’s left to inspire artists today? Billboards dotting a sprawling cityscape; advertising images monopolizing television; print media; fashion; and the sense of a corporate Big Brother gauging people for their potential economic value. It’s all grist for the mill for the artists whose work will be shown in “Illegal Art,” the latest envelope pushing exhibit at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. The traveling exhibition has made waves in New York and San Francisco, and now it’s premiering in South Florida.

The show was organized in 2002 by the Brooklyn based Stay Free magazine. Most of the artists on display have been threatened by some kind of legal action. “This exhibition keeps evolving,” says Samantha Salzinger, director of exhibitions for the artistically adventuresome gallery. “It’s about half video and half two dimensional and three dimensional artwork. It’s a very edgy show, sexually and politically.” On weekends you can catch screenings of impossible to find films like Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which casts a Barbie doll as the doomed Seventies singer, and Brian Boyce’s State of the Union, which portrays George W. Bush’s face as a sun that gazes down on Teletubbies. Other works include Corporate Signs by Danielle Spencer and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, Bill Barminski’s cannibalized Mickey Gas Mask, and Heidi Cody’s “American Alphabet” installation, which is composed of letters from familiar company logos. View more of this provocative exhibit at www.illegal-art.org.
Fri., Feb. 3, 7 p.m.; Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: Feb. 3. Continues through April 2