Tony, Oursler

A student of John Baldessari's at the California Institute of the Arts and a frequent collaborator with Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler plumbs popular and punk culture for the twisted icons that structure our collective unconscious and the ideology of our time. Working in installations, video, sculpture, and a variety of mixed media including dolls and puppets, Oursler creates fragmentary images and scenes that might belong to the hallucinations of a delinquent adolescent on a bad trip. The viewer is left to imagine what ungodly narrative was frozen in time to create such surreal, but somehow uncomfortably familiar, mayhem. Though darkly humorous, his work delves deeply into the question of how the twinned forces of sex and violence, gender and power function in our culture. This catalogue presents a range of recent work and accompanies his one-person exhibition in Milan, Italy.