Tony Hope's "Home Sweet Home"

His series of acrylic collage paintings cleverly blend Christmas imagery with classic cereal logos, video games references, and archival stills from holiday commercials and ads. A life-sized ice cream truck embellished with a giant clown head serves as the exhibition’s centerpiece, acting as a source of light that illuminates the entirety of the exhibition as it moves around the space.

Hope draws perpetual inspiration from Detroit, finding beauty in the remnants of deteriorated architecture and the individuals navigating the outskirts of society. His ability to create entire worlds based on his surroundings, from sculptures made of bones at Yale to crafting Hell-themed sets for Insane Clown Posse, showcases his experimentation with non-traditional mediums. This exploration takes on new meaning in his exhibition, offering a nuanced interpretation of the holidays — not just the joy and cheer, but also the sorrow, anxiety, and fear that can arise during this period. office sat down with Hope to talk holiday frenzy, childhood mall runs, and American car culture hubs.

What's your relationship with Detroit like?

Everything around me is an endless source of inspiration here. It's sort of a ghost town, a wasteland of a city. I like to tell anyone who comes here about the city’s history and what had happened after the riots in the 60s. People that left created all these really perverted communities (the subs) around the city that had no real relationship with it.

Is there a time in your life that you return to for inspiration the most?

It’s probably obvious in the work but childhood and adolescence. I’m 34 and when I look back it seems like it was just yesterday that all these things were here. Now I see my nieces and nephews growing up having a stark relationship to people, surroundings, and technology. I always go back to when I didn’t have problems and the world wasn’t so complicated. It’s what fuels a lot of the work I’m doing right now.

Untitled, 2023
Mixed media, motor, various hardware, electronics, sound
116 x 69 x 127 in.

What made you think of the ice cream truck?

It’s a specific reference to a video game in the 90’s called Twisted Metal. It’s kind of like a Mad Max future where you can be a crooked cop, a gang banger in a lowrider, or you can be a clown in an ice cream truck — you can pick up missiles and throw them at each other. As a kid in the 90’s, I remember getting that game and feeling it was a very strange free-for-all release valve from angst that kids have when we’re young. I was trying to think of something that wasn’t so corny. I wanted a serious, honest attempt to recreate something that could be blended with a painting show to be used as a lighting element, slowly panning across to reveal paintings around the space. The truck came out of those worlds colliding and scaling up something that doesn’t exist. The whole thing is made out of foam, which I had to engineer to rotate because it could only handle 140 pounds.

What was the process like?

I don’t usually plan, like I don’t have a journal filled with ideas. It usually comes from someone saying something like, We should do a solo show, then I’ll talk with the gallery and come up with ideas. I like to work with them and understand the gallery’s interests, while also testing the waters. Todd’s a pretty cool guy, so the weird far out shit that no one in the art world would understand, he’s into. That’s where I shine because I'm kind of an outsider in the art world. He’s on board with me saying, I’m just going to build a giant murder clown ice cream truck with guns everywhere. It might scare some people, but that’s what I’m excited about. 90% of the art doesn’t excite me these days.

I always go back to when I didn’t have problems and the world wasn’t so complicated. It’s what fuels a lot of the work I’m doing right now.

Untitled, 2023
Acrylic paint on canvas
30 x 20 x 7 1/2 in.

Why Christmas for the exhibition?

I planned for the show around Christmas Time. It’s so… I don’t want to say tacky, but expected to have an art show about Christmas during the holiday season. But when you get to the show, it’s very dark, scary and kind of depressing; very overwhelming in all senses; there's different sounds and scents too.

What types of sounds and scents?

I got a bunch of wallflowers at Bath and Body works. The scents are under the Christmas tree, cinnamon sticks, and a perfect christmas. The gallery is so big you could stand in different zones and smell pine trees. Then you go into a different place and it will smell like those awful cinnamon pine cones they have at Joann Fabrics. I wanted it to be overwhelming and exhausting. That feeling when you walk into a mall and you don’t know where you’re at, as if you’re being abandoned in some kind of fun house. There is also music inside the truck that’s playing — a track with a bunch of different Christmas music, adding a bunch of reverb, so it sounds like you’re in a mall that’s really empty and the music is far away. It’s like what clout rappers and kids use to make vapor wavvy songs.

Are the pieces a vessel to critique the commodification of the holiday season?

I think that’s always there no matter what you do, especially when you're dealing with work that has commercial imagery in it. I’m reflecting and contemplating what all these symbols and images mean to us. It’s not as much critiquing it, or saying it’s a bad or good thing necessarily. I am saying these are things that are a part of our everyday life. There’s no hidden agenda to the work themselves. It wasn’t meant to be like a theoretical analysis of consumer culture, consumer waste, or what the companies are doing. It was more so these are everyday things that we need to survive and entertain. The critique lies in our relationship to those things and what it makes us criticize about ourselves. We’re suffering out here and unstable as a whole.

How do you hope to portray where you're from to someone who has never been there during the holidays?

I’m fascinated by these things that come around every year. We have these habits, like getting a Christmas tree and decorating it. A lot of what is in the collages are familiar images that are warm and fuzzy yet deeply sad. Holidays always bring up this remembrance of people or places we don’t have with us anymore. I always think about going to the mall with my family as a kid. My grandma and my aunt worked at a nail place in the mall so we’d get dropped off with them. We didn’t have any money to buy anything, but we would be out there because that was the social scene of the 90’s.

Growing up in Detroit, we never went downtown for anything. To see that all those places are gone now, all we have are our memories. I’m always dealing with ghosts or zombies in a sense of these being dead elements that I try to return to and breathe life into. It’s like manifesting this mental slice of your brain at some place in some way.

Do you have a favorite piece in the exhibition?

There’s a really big collage one, a Christmas-themed one. It has Freddy Kruger on it and there’s a target sign. It’s a really compressed black hole or like a neutron star of Christmas. I wanted to convey that anxiousness of early and mid-December, where you go to work, stop here, stop there, grab dinner ingredients, it’s snowing out and you’re feeling tense. Thinking about all these gatherings to organize, dates to keep track of, presents, kids, dealing with in-laws. This one I feel most captured the static frenzy of the season.

I’m fascinated by these things that come around every year. We have these habits, like getting a Christmas tree and decorating it.

Untitled, 2023
FolkArt brand craft acrylic paint, resin on wood panel
51 1/2 x 32 x 2 in.

Untitled, 2023
FolkArt brand craft acrylic paint, and resin on panel
36 x 34 x 1 1/2 in.

Is your intention with your work to reframe people’s misconceptions of the rust belt, like a new poetics?

[Laughs] Kind of. When I think of poetics, I think of romanticism and going to live in the wilderness, letting the sublime of nature take you over. That’s kind of what it is in the work, being thrown into a circus of different lower middle class car culture people. I’ve tried to communicate their existence through a lot of my work. Juggalo culture is an obvious one, but there are so many niche things — like people who own reptile stores or who collect reptiles or Betty Boop moms who love I Love Lucy.

I get it. It’s refreshing to see that portrayed through your pieces. A lot of artwork is centered around New York and LA, but there’s so much more than these two places, along with many more interesting topics to draw upon than repeating the same dialogue.

Yeah and I think that is why I try to stay out of the art world as much as I can. There’s so many voices there already who don’t have the capacity or the sensitivities to their identity to be comfortable talking about their true interests and making work out of it. So many people just move to New York and fit into the six different categories of artists in NYC. I’m not seeing anyone embracing any other line of thought.

Once a month, I’ll scroll through NADA’s fair and I get excited because I feel like I’m doing something not there. Ok, either no one likes it or isn’t paying attention to be like, Hey we need to start doing something weird because we’re all making the same thing. Artists in general, what we have to represent and get out there is our community, our voice, our own independence, and our tribes.

Art

Luna Luna: Surrealist Spectacle Lands in New York

November 21, 2024

In the 1980s, André Heller, an Austrian artist, singer-songwriter, and former actor, was looking for a new place to showcase his art. He had already taken to gardens, creating a colorful, surrealistic character using 40,000 flowers, and to the skies, organizing a 'fire theatre,' which involved an over-the-top fireworks show complete with steel-frame sculptures set on fire. But he had never tried out a fair.

So began "Luna Luna." Created as the world's first art carnival, "Luna Luna" combined the spectacular with the absurd, showcasing original rides and attractions from rising and already-at-the-top artists in Hamburg. Nearly forty years since its debut, followed by foiled plans for a worldwide tour, breached contracts, and 44 storage containers, the art fair has finally returned, calling New York home after re-debuting last year in Los Angeles.

By Hailey Johnson
Photography by Delvin Claro and Sabrina Sarnitz, courtesy of Luna Luna LLC

On a recent evening in Hudson Yards, a small carousel featured characters in quirky, Twister-like poses and an outstretched dog with seven legs. (Almost a century old, the rides are no longer rideable.) Goofy wooden sculptures were elevated in another corner, some of them cross-eyed or with a horn for a nose. A geodesic dome glowed, with Gregorian chants hovering somewhere above it.

"It's an art experience like no other," Michael Goldberg, Chief Experience Officer of Luna Luna, said recently. "People get to see artists do things they've never done before," he added.

Goldberg, founder of Something Special Studios, a creative agency behind many Nike campaigns, was determined to resurrect “Luna Luna” after reading about it online in 2019. Goldberg shopped for investors, eventually teaming up with DreamCrew, a media company co-owned by the rapper Drake. (Details on the company's investment remain vague; sources have reported that DreamCrew spent over "100 million dollars.") In 2022, an intensive restoration process began, with a team of artists reviving many of the original works, which had remained in boxes in a Texas warehouse for over thirty years. Several had been in pieces. (The team reportedly had to rebuild each work "bolt by bolt.")

That night, at the Shed, fourteen out of the original thirty-five works were on display, including the small carousel (Keith Haring), the goofy sculptures (Kenny Scharf), the neon dome (Salvador Dali), and a towering Ferris wheel decorated in drawings of stick figures, upside crowns, and references to Jim Crow (Basquiat). Missing works are in a "constant state of restoration," Goldberg said. Meanwhile, new attractions are joining the line-up. For the New York show, the Puerto Rican duo Poncilí Creación was commissioned to create "PonciliLand," a blink-and-you-miss-it section where guests "can create fantastical characters out of custom building blocks." Poncili also developed floating characters, inspired by performers who circulated the original “Luna Luna” fairgrounds in 1987. Known as "Lovers," the two characters, large and dreamlike, teetered to one side, mumbling the kind of nervous groans one does before a fall. (They never ended up falling.)

I asked Goldberg if, given that today's culture doesn't quite look or feel the same way as it did in 1987, there was any hesitation in showing some of the original works. On a back wall, a tribute featured Manfred Diex's "Palace of the Wind," a show featuring performers who fart into a microphone; on another, two ornate pedestals held sculptures of spiral poop.

"I don't see any reason why we wouldn't show any of these works," he said. "A lot of the time, art is exclusive and uninviting. The big difference between “Luna Luna” and other art experiences is that it has many sides to it, and things that have a bit of humor and playful energy. "As for "Palace of the Winds,” the decision to keep it was simple: farting is universal. He went on: "The “Crap Chancellery" is, conceptually, one of the most important works in “Luna Luna.” Daniel Spoerri's dad was killed in the Holocaust, and the work was inspired by Albert Speer, who was Hitler's architect. He took the facade of what was meant to be a Nazi shrine and turned it into the facade of a bathroom with two steaming statues of shit standing on the outside. These works are extremely important and are things that we would definitely want to honor and draw attention to."

As “Luna Luna” further develops, the show will likely change. "It will continue to evolve as we go to different cities in response to the spaces that we pop up into and in collaboration with the local city," Goldberg said." With it, there will be new characters and new stories to tell. One aspect that won't change, though, as Goldberg assured, is a long-held sentiment about a potential partnership. At one point, early on during the original “Luna Luna” era, McDonald's wanted to buy into it. Heller said no, adding that he "didn't want it to feel like Disneyland." Goldberg agreed. Nonetheless, as I watched Kenny Scharf's dizzying swing ride go around for what felt like the hundredth time, with the cartoon characters decorated on it blurring together (one with a villain's grin, another morphed into a martini glass), I couldn't help but feel like maybe I was at Disneyland, only not as robbed, but just as entertained and exhausted by its rides and fantastical characters, and wanting to go again.

Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987.

Art

Pamela Sneed’s Speaking Tongue opens at Dashwood Projects

November 15, 2024

Pamela Sneed’s latest exhibition, Speaking Tongue, will be on view at Dashwood Projects from November 20 to December 21. The show features twenty watercolor and ink paintings inspired by her recent trip to Kenya, where she was deeply moved by the elegance of giraffes, the landscapes, and the energy of Nairobi.

Blending her background as a poet and visual artist, Sneed’s work reflects on themes of identity, nature, and connection. Her paintings capture the beauty and spirit of the animals she encountered, alongside reflections on her own experiences as part of the African diaspora.

This exhibition marks Sneed’s first solo show with Dashwood Projects and will be accompanied by a new book, also titled Speaking Tongue, to be released in December.

By Enzo Holdt
Artworks by Pamela Sneed

Art

Tiebreaker - Alvin Armstrong

November 15, 2024

There is a moment of silence right before the play. Just before the racket strikes the ball as it hangs weightless in the air, breathless and charged. It’s the fleeting yet decisive instant that can alter the course of the match, determining who wins and who loses.

Alvin Armstrong depicts this crucial moment in his new exhibition Tiebreaker, symbolizing the risks and rewards of competition. It’s an implication of something else at stake, where athletes push not only their bodies, but their spirits to the absolute limit.

The dynamic figures embody the strength, grace, and agility juxtaposed by the vibrant color palette evoking not just the joy of competition but the charged energy of the court.

Tiebreaker is opening Thursday, November 16th at Anna Zorina Gallery.