You are invited to step into a candy coated world of pure imagination. Lucky Charms is a confection frosted in all the syrupy sweetness of Saturday morning cartoon culture with a tummy ache. Meet the Tricked out Ponies and their little candy land buddies. Come and find out why this world is magically delicious.
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LumpWest Project Space heads into summer with a flurry of installations: The first of 3 shows in 3 weeks is 'Lucky Charms'. Erin Osswald has drawn the connections between marketing strategies, merchandising and sugar, and the result is an installation that lands somewhere between sick and sweet. This show opens this friday, June 8th at 7pm till 10pm. 2493 Harris St, entrance off of 25th ave. next week look out as contract returns
posted by UO Digital Arts at 8:51 AM
4 Comments:
Loved the Charms - wish I could have been there. Way to go, Erin.
DannaD
I just got a chance to look at the Lucky Charms. Erin you did a great job. It is so nice to be able to see your work. Keep me posted on future exibits.
Brian B
LUCKY CHARMS: A World of Pure Imagination.
*It’s Magically Delicious*
Lucky Charms is an amalgamation of the sugary land of Saturday morning cartoon culture and the resulting breakdown between the imaginary and “real” worlds? On any given Saturday morning in the western world a child can simultaneously play with a toy while network television is broadcasting a cartoon about the toy with which they are playing. Additionally it is common for the child to be consuming a cereal that is likely to relate to the merchandising scheme of their toys or cartoons and most definitely will be advertised while they are watching television, probably as an animated commercial. This ritual is a secular form of communion and is appropriate for our increasingly isolated modern culture because every child participating in the ritual is doing so from the comfort of their own living rooms. They are all separated by space but not by time. The scenario I’ve described creates a fully sensory feedback loop utilizing the tools of marketing and cleverly hooking the youngest demographic group on a lifetime of consumption and basing their identities on external fictions.
The images presented here have been focused through the bent lens of nostalgia upon the early 1980’s and the swell in consumerism that I recall from growing up at that time. I’m happy to bring these icons full circle from their introduction into toy culture during the advent of postmodernism to their fully realized hybridization today. I have highlighted the strangeness of the era, not the reality of it. The work is a bit twisted, kind of like being a kid at the time and half knowing that Reagan was a jackass and the whole cold war issue was broiling (which was amplified for me by growing up in one of the top nuclear targets in the United States), and seeing that the economy was whacked, but being seduced by the bright colors and the lure of advertising for these toys and the experiences they promised. As an adult I’m still seduced by the bright colors and want to believe that I’m immune to the affects of advertising, but I know better. After all, I am a product of my culture just like you are.
Erin Duffy Osswald
06/08/07
Thanks for all the kind remarks, everyone. Please follow this link to my portfolio if you are interested in my other projects, as well.
http://erinduffyosswaldportfolio.blogspot.com/
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