I am the night

http://brandonbird.com/i_am_the_night.html

This guy has amazing technique, to say the least. Some elements look like cut-and-paste photos, but the grabber is his technique and attention to all the things that made being a kid in one of those shitty knock-off costumes great: shameless television/movie title plug, a representation of the character worn (normally much better than the mask), and those fucking die-in-a-suffocating-fire-of-melted-plastic pants. The composition of that painting is very much as we remember, from the plastic camera lens of mom's or dad's camera. With his thumb pressing down on his forefinger, the kid is mildly inconvenienced by the deferral of his candy gathering, while the parent is just as certain to select a flattering element of the house. The door bears the mark of the culture: mass production, mass identification, consumption, and an attendant fear of lack. The address is the unique identifying feature of the house that is just as certain to conjure a childhood ritual of reciting vital information in the event the child is lost as it is to function as placeholder in a vast databases of households and demographic metrics used to calculate property value, to determine the mass mail that is sent, or to plan the kinds of entertainment programs it--and others like it--will watch.

A couple more notables:

http://brandonbird.com/battle_of_the_heroes.html


And this is how I remember my childhood, time spent in soft-focus.

http://brandonbird.com/sears.html

Because he's feeding old icons back through the lens of nostalgic memory each cuts a heroic profile among the mise en scene of childhood play with manufactured goods. I am going to tentatively call his art the syndicated sublime.