A montage of short clips from Warner Brothers' cartoons at the precise moment when a character is struck, shot, smacked, or exploded in front of the viewer. What unfolds is an endless barrage of unresolved cartoon violence.
My projects use humor and spectacle to engage the viewer and entice them into contemplation of mass-culture. The spectacular elements arise primarily from entertainment and commercial contexts; the humor develops from the insertion of expressive content to these contexts. I approach each project like a piece of pop music: it must be concise and catchy, and the surface meaning must be clear within a few moments. In addition, each piece contains a built-in self-criticality based on my own perceptions of mass media. Within each seductive artifact lies earnest contradiction between the synthetic and the emotional.
The majority of my work begins with an unresolved pop-culture obsession, which evolves into a research project. If successful, the research culminates in the discovery of an archetype: an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious [Jung]. After isolating an archetype, I begin to scrutinize my relationship to it, focusing on the physical material, literal content, and traditional context of the model. The model then evolves into an existential reinterpretation based on my relationship to the archetype. The resultant artwork is both familiar and inexplicable.
Since I am interested in the communication methods of mass-culture, I work in diverse media, reflecting the diversity of contemporary experience. The distribution and reception of my work is often an integral part of the work itself. By seeking-out multiple audiences and varied contexts, I can expand the life-experience of an individual project - mimicking the "all over" experience of ubiquitous pop-culture forms.

Gabriel Fowler