cary loren: polaroids

Polaroids by American artist, musician, writer and bookshop keeper Cary Loren interleaves snapshots of his 1970s Detroit entourage with photographs of his elaborately staged collage assemblages of prints, TV stills, magazine covers, stickers, movie posters and other ephemera. The Polaroid medium enables him to manipulate what are seemingly unrelated visual idioms and image carriers in the development process by scratching and pressing the emulsion and combining them into pictures of painterly quality. Loren’s alchemy of works fuses personal with mythological elements, mixing Christian iconography with icons of pop, sci-fi/monster and b-movie culture with the Golden Age of Hollywood as well as aesthetics from trash magazine publications (The National Enquirer, Famous Monsters of Filmland and Screw) into a highly idiosyncratic post-Warholian pop cultism. The Addams Family rubs shoulders with heavenly angels, as does the notions of the grotesque morphing with the beautiful. It’s Loren’s r