Adult Contemporary

Zoe Alameda, Caroline Douville, Wallace Dibble, Liza Jo Eilers, Kyle Gallagher, Aaron Elvis Jupin, Kim Kyne Cohen, Kristen Landsman, Malek Lazri, Libbi Ponce, Raffi and Al’s, Hank Reavis, Gabriel Rozzell, Anaïs De Los Santos, Lucien Smith

In Adult Contemporary, Problem Child Advisory presents an infantry of cyborgs, alchemizing the excess of our hyper-saturated visual culture and dissolving the boundaries between our physical and digital realms in the pursuit of sincere pleasure and connection. Ranging from a hydrochromic ink painting that reveals a vintage magazine nudie when wet, to a supersized, gingerbread cookie chimera that conjoins Adam, Eve, temptation, and sin, the works embrace the multiplicity of our virtual landscape and its disruptions, which collapse the distinction between physical and virtual – to challenge normative systems that seek to regulate and alienate us from every form of pleasure.

While the excessiveness of our digital landscape can reflect its exploitation by hegemonic powers, it also paradoxically creates a space for a new shared visual culture, which ferments new potentialities that inextricably link us with one another, both on and offline. The excess acts as an enzyme for new forms of connection, subverting dominant ideologies and their regulatory impulses that attempt to commodify and police culture in order to reinforce their own normative ideals, including our desires.

The works collectively embody a playful, lighthearted spirit that speaks to our insatiable appetite for unrestricted laughter and ecstasy. The marriage of the virtual and the physical allows us to conjure new modalities which extend beyond the screen, reconfiguring the ways in which we connect in our material world, just as much as in our virtual world, and everywhere in between. Adult Contemporary unapologetically invokes a blend of traditional and experimental processesand mediums as sites of exchange, often referencing viral imagery and popular culture as a way of cheekily embracing the amorphous, infinite webs of pleasure and connection.

—Tamara Martínez Bravo