Kitschy Koo

Kitschy Koo investigates modern celebrity as a reflection of the mass media’s positioning of the female role in Western culture. Celebrity worship indicates individual ambition and value in present-day society. Who profits from the sale of image and for what purposes? Using recognizable cultural imagery, this work explores the evaluation of women through the lens of culture, time and taste by looking at one female celebrity, Princess Diana. Princess Diana is a multivalent sign. Through mass-produced emotion-laden images, and soap opera style tabloid stories, her imagery achieves a "super" iconicity in the realm of famous for being famous. Her life in media images, both in print and on television, continues to be visual spectacle, the first reality show. Princess Diana’s life story told and retold through mass media is the embodiment and performance of national identity, the myth of the greatness and continuity of the English (and American) feminine, the appropriate example of the female gender.

Bees throughout this series are presented as visual signs and language, metaphors for western culture and western class divisions. The hive images reference class structure and society. Individual members of a hive society are both prepared for and taught society's rules through media. Mass media takes the role of the parent, preaching through selection and coverage of world events. The attraction of flowers for the bees is both encoded and learned. The flowers represent “pretty”, inexpensive, saccharine, kitschy consumer purchase hurled by and at the bees as aggressive signals of sacrificial affection provoking  dialogue about what media-driven phenomena might signal or reveal about present-day Western culture. 

Kitschy Koo consists of 63 hexagon shaped 3 foot in diameter giclée (produced on a fine arts inkjet printer) prints that are mounted on Sintra board that have been exhibited in different installations depending on the gallery space. One arrangement is shown here. The prints are modular and have been exhibited in different “honeycomb” arrangements in gallery spaces using a many as all 63 prints and as few as 4 prints.