Mitchell Syrop
Kuhlenschmidt/Simon Gallery
Mitchell Syrop likes to refer to himself as “an industrial folk artist.” Combining text and commercial photographic imagery, Syrop exploits the language and marketing techniques of Madison Avenue in order to deconstruct the ideology of “received” information. His usual strategy is to juxtapose an appropriated image with a clichéd slogan or witty pun, so that the imperative voice of official language becomes an agency for semantic closure, dictating how the total “package” should and must be read.
In the past, Syrop has walked a thin line between propagating and debunking such reifying mechanisms.