MESS AGE

For the exhibition MESS AGE, photographers Katie Huisman, Mel Yap, and Alex Waber appropriated and visually responded to Lincoln Clarkes’s mid-’90s text pieces. The photographic works invite the viewer to step into a less literal reality, leaving behind ingrained political thinking while suggesting that we reconnect to our own ideological mindset.

Clarkes’s pop conceptual text pieces from 1995 maintain poignant relevance today. Though they appear to be aggressive propaganda at first glance, the messages are anti-political and playful in their duality of meaning. Clarkes’s text works emphasize an individualistic ideology, drawing a comparison between the clichéd “Keep Calm and Carry On” motto of the twenty-first century and the reality of the “MESS AGE” we really live in and think about.