Llyn Foulkes

Three works in the exhibition make cutting reference to Disney, Foulkes’s long-time bête noire. In Family Portrait (2022), the artist has replaced the heads of a couple and baby in a formal photograph with black-and-white visages of an ossified Mickey Mouse. The image is set against a chalkboard covered with half-erased messages about the financial worth of children. The cartoon rodent also crops up in Implantation (2019–21) and Untitled: Baby Mickey (2020). In the former, he appears in the form of a classic round-eared hat, on the face of a wristwatch, and as the graphic on a “face mask required” sign. The title, inscribed beneath the image, refers to the moment when a fertilized egg attaches to the uterine lining, an allusion to the beginning of life that here allegorizes commercial indoctrination. In the latter work, the familiar silhouette of Mickey’s head masks that of a baby in an ornate vintage gown, wholly erasing its identity.

Foulkes’s caustic, often deliberately crude sense of humor is on display throughout the exhibition. In Skin Flute (2020), he works with a vintage photograph, replacing the subject’s head with a cartoonlike drawing of a penis, a musical stave arching over the whole composition. Creeps (2021) depicts a MAGA-hatted father and son, their faces represented by female torsos in the manner of Magritte’s Rape (1945), leering at a third figure who rebuffs them with the titular insult. Combining such visual wit with a freewheeling collage style, informed by artists ranging from John Heartfield and Hannah Höch to Edward Kienholz and George Helms, Foulkes continues to meld coruscating observations on American pop culture and political life with investigations into the nature of the painted, constructed, and photographic image.