Last century's cartoons submit to this century's snarky art remixes in the fourth iteration of group exhibition Gag Me With a Toon. Opening Saturday at the WWA Gallery, curators Steven Daily and Tomi Monstre's nostalgic weirding jams classic comics like Peanuts and Super Friends through strange filters.
"Children born in the '70s, '80s and '90s intimately identify with these characters, who were magical vehicles to other worlds," Daily told Wired.com by e-mail. "Cartoons on today are nothing but farts, screaming and product placement. This exhibition reminisces over our childhood shows, but through the lenses of our adult experiences."
Those lenses are alternately hilarious and moving. Consider Lou Pimenetel's One Is the Loneliest Number – viewable in Wired.com's Gag Me With a Toon preview gallery above – which shows a solitary boy decked out in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles gear who seems to be missing his playmates. Or Sally Splab's hilarious Sigmund the Freud, a psychoanalytic goof on Sid and Marty Krofft's acid puppet fantasy Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
It's such an obvious pop-cult collision that we wonder why no one (that we know of) has done it before. The smattering of Lebowskis, however, predictably bow down to Los Angeles lore.
"The Big Lebowski has a huge cult appeal to the adults who are enamored with the cartoons that are the main subject of the show," Daily said.
Daily started Gag Me With a Toon's perennial showcase four years ago by heckling his art pals to contribute pieces in deference to their favorite childhood shows. Since then, the exhibit's focus has widened its original '80s scope to include shows from the '70s and '90s.
>"There's a hopeless resignation on Wonder Woman and Superman’s faces that we have all felt."
It's added ever more participants working in graffiti, sculpture, painting and illustration, which eventually necessitated a move to the comparatively larger WWA Gallery, which adjoins Culver City's longtime toon-art collector Wonderful World of Animation.
"There are a lot of great ideas in this show," said Daily. "We're particularly enthralled with Justin Bloomer's No Goodniks (above), a masterful portrayal of Rocky and Bullwinkle's nemeses Boris and Natasha in a pulp fashion. Craig Edmunds' Captain Planet Is a Doucher (also above) is pretty fantastic too. There's a hopeless resignation on Wonder Woman and Superman’s faces that we have all felt."
Gag Me With a Toon opens at 7 p.m. Saturday and runs until April 21.
