Ask Officer Pepperspray Mark Flood

Mark Lood: Ask Officer Pepperspray is the fifth solo exhibition at Peres Projects by the Houston-based artist Mark Flood. This is his first with the pseudonym Mike Lood.

 

The origins of Flood’s practice lay at the punk scene of the early 1980s, a time period Flood terms the hateful years because of the culturally stifling reign of Ronald Reagan. In 2013, his work is more timely and vital than ever. Navigating between art, music, and social critique, Flood subverts mass media’s directives on which celebrities to worship, which products to use, and fundamentally on how to behave.

 

In Ask Officer Pepperspray, Flood is presenting new large scale works from his text, muted and lace painting series alongside previously unseen Logo paintings as well as sculptures. In the logo paintings, Flood undermines the one-way mass communication of corporations by altering the emblems at the core of their public image. The logo paintings are large-scale printed works on canvas in which the logos of companies which both define and dictate our culture and daily lives are abstracted almost beyond recognition in the printing process. In Ask Officer Pepperspray, Flood juxtaposes these large abstractions with his lace and text paintings as if to give us new possible interpretations and meanings with which to decipher the never-ending and powerful corporate commands.

 

Flood began creating his lace paintings as the politically and socially charged 1980s crossed over to the booming 1990s. Fed up with the lack of cultural and political agitation and the overwhelming and penetrating presence of viral advertising, Flood consciously decided to loose himself in meticulously laid layers of color and abstraction. Departing from the irony used in his other bodies of work, these intricate and delicate lace paintings are formally beautiful patterned lace stencils, torn apart to reveal windows looking out on infinite space. The lace paintings seen in the context of the exhibition seem equally subversive yet beautifully compelling.

 

Flood’s subversions continue to focus largely on his use of the language, vocabulary and stylings of the American media machine. Flood “mutes” advertisements where the intended message is blacked out, cut up or otherwise disemboweled. His text works employ the conscious misspelling of words and poke fun at conventions of signage while others combine sinister statements with advertising slogans all in the name of indicting media and propaganda’s manipulative potential. The result are often new commands, or statements, DESTROY THE EVIDENCE, FANTASIZE ABOUT VIOLENCE, DISABLE YOUR CONSCIENCE, which seem to inform us of the true messages advertisers employ over the masses. Even the cute symbols of advertising are employed by Flood and transformed into sculptures with new messages, a hamburger from one of the fast-food giants becomes a FUCK ME BURGER, and the M&M candy man instructs us to EAT PUSY.