Sunday in the Subway with Posterboy
The more you see it, the more you know it down in your heart that we have turned a corner.
Hype be damned, the result of Posterboy’s plundering of the inescapable advertising messages you pay $2 to see in the subway is a new visual vocabulary that continues to pull surreal visual punches when you least expect it. These portraits below could be the work of Posterboy, one of his admirers, or it could be the work of a team. From the average viewers perspective, that’s hardly the point. The fact that new subway ads are made of this easy-to-manipulate vinyl sticky backed material, coupled with the fact that there are rarely subway personnel or police in the subway stations these days, and you have a primo creative laboratory for everyone from “culture jammers” to collage artists to pop surrealists. It’s the visual equivalent of the mash-up so popular in the digital DJ age; whole cloth samples snatched from fully realized pieces and re-matched with other genres, categories, styles, and eras. Sometimes the results are genius, sometimes clunky, many times causing nauseous feelings of disorientation.
