Ka-Pow! Comics and Cartoons in Contemporary Culture [Installation View]

After

, I stopped by the Ka-Pow! gallery show, which was on the other end of Lipscomb's campus. The scope of the exhibit is really enormous — comics AND cartoons AND contemporary culture, and the ways that they all connect. As I said in

everything from Andy Warhol to Takashi Murakami falls into the art/comics crease. Our world is so image-heavy that we absorb visual information without even realizing it, and so comics and cartoons often become building blocks for culture, instead of the other way around.

All that is to say that an exhibit based on this cross-disciplinary premise is going to be extremely hard to pull off. The Lipscomb show paired some great work by local comic artists with a few Roy Lichtenstein paintings prints — ballsy move. It was a bit of a stretch to connect them in one fell swoop, but I think I understood the subtext: Art borrows from comics and cartoons, not just a little, but a lot.

I wished that there was more from the comics artists to look at. One or two Lichtenstein-scale paintings are great in a single gallery space, but when I'm looking at illustrations from a comic book, I often want to read the whole thing, so give me as much as possible. And it would have been great to show an actual Doug cartoon instead of the framed animation cells they went with instead. I'm all for multimedia! I almost would have preferred a "Lichtenstein in one corner, Eric Powell in the other" graphic vs. fine art takedown.

But listen: This is, as curator Rocky Horton says, "a brief overview." Powell's work was surprisingly dark, and I had no idea he had done artwork for a Batman Arkham Asylum storyline, which is always some of the creepiest stuff comics offer. Nate Creekmore's panels were also fantastic — they told the story of Humphrey, a weird sort of golem that lived during what looks like ancient Hebrew times. I also loved the Philippe Parreno "Speech Bubbles" — even though I was the only person in the room, it looked like an invisible crowd was yelling all around me. The walls were painted candy colors, and there were bean bag chairs that looked like chewed-up pieces of bubble gum in every corner of the room. The space, which is really more of an entryway than a white-box gallery, had a few tables in it, which gave me that weird "Is it art or just regular stuff?" dilemma that I always find so hilarious.

I took some shots of the exhibit, which was really really dimly lit. (I use my iPhone as a camera, so picture quality is always sort of a gamble.) The exhibit is up through April 18, which gives you plenty of time to check it out for yourself.