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.

Since 1973, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz have divided their time between West Berlin and the small town of Hope, Idaho. This geographical marriage of extremely diverse cultures corresponds with the husband-and-wife team’s artistic collaboration, creating a contextual and personal dialectic of considerable complexity and interest. Edward is well known for his large-scale environmental tableaux, in particular the infamous Roxy’s, 1961, and The Back Seat Dodge—’38, 1962–64, which fused hard-hitting social comment with almost Dadaist black humor. Nancy, on the other hand, is a photographer and

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.

Since 1973, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz have divided their time between West Berlin and the small town of Hope, Idaho. This geographical marriage of extremely diverse cultures corresponds with the husband-and-wife team’s artistic collaboration, creating a contextual and personal dialectic of considerable complexity and interest. Edward is well known for his large-scale environmental tableaux, in particular the infamous Roxy’s, 1961, and The Back Seat Dodge—’38, 1962–64, which fused hard-hitting social comment with almost Dadaist black humor. Nancy, on the other hand, is a photographer and