Artist Portfolio Magazine’s 10 Art Competition

Ken Forbes – Brooklyn, NY

Both Suckers V1 and Whore are part of my Anti Social Media Series. In contemporary American society, the dark side of technology has caused the perverse over sexualization of young women and the erroneous reward and emphasis on the material façade. My artistic inspirations stem from the Founding Fathers of Pop art. These pieces give homage to both Lichtenstein and Warhol in both technique and context. Pop art’s birth stemmed from the realization that our conscious and subconscious (shared or otherwise as John Cage would suggest) are more riddled than anything else with the images of sex and popular culture and social media that pollute every sense of daily lives. This oversexualization and social media dependency is further exemplified by Facebook, quite possibly the biggest offender of both false advertising genial perversion of women in particular. As the leader of the social media craze, it is intrinsically often also the biggest propagator of body image, insecurity, and the “like culture” that has created the Kardashian’s as well as our “Instagram Models” of today. We play with the idea of the revival of Pop art in the lollipop context. We also plead guilty as “suckers” dominate the subject material. This theme is further developed in “Whore.” When I asked a female friend what her perception of women in American society was, she replied, “they’re whores!” I then took to googling the word “whore” as well as the others in the piece. The corresponding definitions were the first to pop up on Google. To my unfortunate epiphany, these definitions are then also the first thing to be seen by poor young girls in today’s society who are to look up the disgusting phrases thrown in their faces on a daily basis; these definitions and images, the things shaping the development of innocent impressionable young women, who all too often fall victim to the careless fallacies of our patriarchal society.