George W. Bush probably never dreamed he’d ever spend a week trapped in a room with Madonna, Bjork and Eminem. But that’s where he is now—his face, anyway. And according to artist Blair Prentice, who’s captured all those and more in a collection of portraits on display at the Isabel Bader Theatre this week, that’s all you need. Sometimes not even that much. His painting “W” is a strip of bold colour punctuated with black strokes that, after a minute, resolve into those gimlet eyes staring out at you. Just the eyes, but there’s no question who it is.
“That’s how much he’s been ingrained in people’s minds,” Prentice says. “He wasn’t there four years ago and now we can recognize the wrinkles around his eyes, the way that when he speaks he curves his eyebrows.” This is all part of Prentice’s pet theory, neatly encapsulated in the title of his show, You Fit In A Small Box. The “box” is “a set of codes that celebrities seem to have to adhere to.”
“Because there are so many different opinions among people about what they like, what’s important, it seems there’s a very small common ground, and that’s the shifting set of codes they have to try and peg themselves in so they can remain popular.” Shifting indeed. It’s hard to imagine what patch of common ground the above-named luminaries could fit on. Prentice admits, “I don’t think you can really peg it down, except for through the people and what they stand for.”
But, he adds, “For them to fit the constraints, they have to be broken down.” That’s where Prentice’s paintings come in. “Because I’ve broken it down to the basic lines, people are forced to realize that they recognize the celebrity, because from these basic, basic features, that person is imprinted on their mind.”
The portraits themselves are very cool, very Warhol—clean black lines and Crayola tones. They’d look great on t-shirts. They are, like their subjects, ultra-accessible. Prentice is just fine with this. After referring to himself as a “publicity slut,” he notes that the Latin roots of “prostitute” mean “to put forward,” which is exactly what he’s doing. “I’m asking [the public] to put me within that popular box.” This is rather intriguing, since Prentice (a fourth-year environment and society student with minors in economics and cinema studies) is part of the young, hip, well-educated demographic that finds it hard to even say “pop culture” without cringing or retching.
“It’s very problematic,” he acknowledges. “People who do fit our societal constraints do sort of shape our view of reality.” But, he adds, “It might not be dangerous. It might just be inevitable.” He points to Bjork and her fellow oxymorons—“fringe” artists with mainstream success. “They think they’re outside the box? They’re still in the box. They put it out there and people accepted it…. The box shifts inevitably.
“I think people just want change. Although Eminem and Madonna and Bjork all seem to push the boundaries with their powerful little hands, their celebrity stature, their ideas, it’s really a part of the larger set of actions and ideas.… They are the now. They’re what we’re concerned with now.”
And Prentice? “I’m trying to capture the now, and leave that as a residue for the future, so that we know what happened.”
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
