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Peter Mars has been the leader of Chicago`s Avant Pop Movement for the past fifteen years. Combining avant-garde innovation with a deep Pop Art sensibility, Mars fuses and confuses the traditional distinctions between high culture and low art. The artist`s sensibilities fall somewhere between Dada and Pop, "In that area where nonsense and popular culture so frequently meet." |
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Using the joy and nostalgia that can be found in everyday objects, Mars explores American culture, the passage of time, and the icons that each period adopts as its own. Billboard advertisements with years of old ads peeling through, outmoded wallpaper designs overprinted with modern icons, recognizable typography overlaps young female faces, antique Coca Cola logos juxtaposed with a fresh-faced Elvis —each elicits a multiplicity of American eras and cultural identities.
Much of Mars` work reflects the pop culture of his childhood in the 1960s and 70s, notably the idealized American family, comic book figures, and "space age" invention. In magazine advertising, product design, and television programming Mars finds a fertile language with which to work. To say that Mars appropriates these images, however, does not capture the rich exchange of ideas that takes place on canvas. These are dialogues, every bit as much "collaborations" as the work Mars created with notable "outsider" artists Howard Finster, R.A. Miller, Wesley Willis and "Big Al" Taplet.
Born in Portland, Oregon in 1959, Peter Mars began collecting at an early age: match packs, comic books, baseball cards, arrowheads, coins and later, motorcycles. Rather than striving to compile exhaustive collections, Mars sought "separate images of beauty," small treasures that "tell the story of American popular culture."
Using silkscreen as his medium of choice, Mars is able to engage his subject matter in a way that lets images "speak their own language." In juxtaposition, they agree or disagree, emphasize or interrupt, as if in animated conversation. The result is textured, complex, wry, and always more than the sum of its parts.
Peter Mars` work appears in galleries from coast to coast and can be found in the collections of: Nate Berkus, Oprah`s Interior Designer, Sheryl Crow, Michael Jordan, Betsey Johnson, Halo Industries, Tow Records, Elisa Behnk, Former Director of Public Information and Marketing for The Carnegie, Warhol and MOMA Museums and Mr. & Mrs. John Heinz Waller.
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