#juxtoposition

🔵  Here’s a little BLUESDAY inspiration from our Contemporary Art collection, currently on view in Infinite Blue.

Jamian Juliano-Villani is a contemporary painter who mixes art historical, fashion, and pop culture references to create humorous representations of our materialistic era. Her work addresses the changed nature of everyday life in the age of the internet—the dizzying juxtaposition of images, styles, and identities in the media—amid the dissolution of such long-established standards as “authorship” and copyright.

In Three Penny Opera a blue model, recalling characters by street artist KAWS, sports an ensemble by fashion-design collective Vaquera while strutting down the runway clutching banal Amazon Prime and Key Food shopping bags. Combining deliberately confusing high-fashion culture with quotidian consumerism, Juliano-Villani offers this image as a criticism of capitalism itself by titling the work after Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary socialist play The Threepenny Opera (1928).