Apparently America pop-culture is a universal language. From Canada, Kenn Sakurai and Dave O'Regan have had exhibitions in New York, Seattle, California, Vancouver, and most recently in Sweden. It's almost as if, through the hundreds of images they create in their studios, they're fueling the globalization of American culture. Not that this is a bad thing. In fact, it's so good at poking fun of consumerism and the media that you can't help but laugh and realize how ridiculous it can all get.

Both graduates from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with quite a bad attendance record I hear, Sakurai and O'Regan fuse text with image and popular culture to catch the viewer's attention. By doing so, it's somewhat easier to create associations and have that overall feeling of "I totally get it!" Much like Shepard Fairey, they are putting notions of advertising and commodity out there in the public; they too promote themselves via stickers, buttons, and wheat pasting. But more than anything else, their work parallels Andy Warhol, who himself is a target in their imagery. Just as Warhol addressed issues of fame and identity through repeated imagery, while at the same time reducing the subject, they use images of celebrity (the Rock, Martha Stewart, Milla Jovovich, and text with Ice-T & David Lee Roth) to grab our attention and make us see something deeper than we usually do. They make social commentary with text such as "kids watch t.. so they can become the people their parents couldn't be" and remember kids, when you grow up, smoke like a champ, drink excessive alcohol and read lots of porn."

On a lighter note, I think one of the most interesting aspects of their work is the massive quantities. For this exhibition, they sent me hundreds of postcards (of which I chose 40) and a ton of prints, (of which I chose 19). In the September issue of edge MAGAZINE in Sweden, they say "We find it cool when people choose the ones they like out of the thousands of them that we've done. We don't have any favorites or arrangements that we think work well." Thus, viewer participation completes the process ...our recognition and our connection allows the work to be finished and lets it exsist. This notion of involving people, essentially anyone who has a T.V, reads the newspaper, and walks outside is so important as it reduces exclusivity and seriousness in art.