FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kristi Engle Gallery
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com

Having worked as a background designer in animated cartoons for several years, Montreal-based artist, Philip Kitt became interested in the possibilities of cultural critique using the forms and methods of cartoon production. The standard method of prodoction for cartoons is for large teams of drawers/designers to work at specific tasks to create one cohesive animated story or episode. This method aims to erase the hand of each individual artist, thereby achieiving a homogenous look for the whole product.

Kitt, interested in experimenting with this kind of process, provides preliminary drawings and design direction to profesional background artists, who are directed by Kitt to give the image a specific stylized treatment. The resulting images depict such scenes as an illegal drug lab in the style of Disney's Pinocchio, an ATM machine in the style of the PBS children's cartoon, Arthur, and a police roadblock in the style of Disney's Pocahontas. Kitt then recreates these cartoon background "templates" as large-scale paintings under the collaborative name of Cartoon Logic.

Classic cartoon animation is distinguished by its use of hyberbolic, logic-defying violence accompanied by a fantastic malleibility in the characters' bodies. Characters are made to endure sadistic punishment often as retribution for desire. In the Warner Bros. Roadrunner cartoons, Wile E. Coyote becomes the model consumer as he orders a wild array of equipment from the ACME Company to aid his insatiable quest for his prey. For Kitt, the work of Cartoon Logic provides "an interesting departure point for cultural critique, a means to represent the vacuity of extreme consumerism, the homogenization of contemporary culture, our neuroses, fears, obsessions and desires".

While cartoon characters undergo bizarre and violent contortions, cartoon backgrounds, in contrast are a simple stage. Backgrounds present a world that is inherently empty, stripped to its barest essentials onto which characters can be placed and annimated. By presenting backgrounds alone, Cartoon Logic prepares new ground for our own imagination - classic genre treatments of odd and disquieting scenes. The result is a reverse "Disneyfication" where it is not the everyday that is made into a cartoon world, cleaned up and idealized, but rather the discomfort of our daily lives that is introduced into the illusory cartoon.

Kristi Engle Gallery devotes itself primarily to solo exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists. It is located in Highland Park, near the corner of Ave. 50 and York Blvd.