ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

Last night, Alex Pardee opened his Letters From Digested Children solo show at San Francisco’s FIFTY24SF. The central theme of the exhibition is missing children who have been eaten by monsters. Since monsters have slow digestive systems, many of the children are still alive inside their stomachs. While the children wait for salvation, they scrawl S.O.S. letters. Alex collected these missives, along with police reports and portraits of some of the “more popular” monsters, transforming the gallery into a walk-in milk carton. This is concept art and is best experienced to be appreciated. For our readers around the globe, I’ll try to explain.

Take Veronica Pickles, for example. She was last seen by a neighbor with an overactive bladder heading toward a Castle Greyskull-like structure known as The Mouth. When the ground “shook like Michael J. Fox,” the neighbor called the Cardboard City police. Here, Alex Pardee uses his entire arsenal: signature monster art with great storytelling and a generous peppering of pop culture.

Alex modestly explains the show’s theme as “just wanting to draw some monsters,” but the visceral creatures are really the secondary characters in this story. Through the police reports and S.O.S. letters, viewers get to know the children. (A popular question going around the opening was “Who wrote the letters?” Alex stuck to the response: ‘The children!”) Since Alex’s art is seldom short of monsters, I found myself really focusing on the simple (dare I say cute?) aesthetic of the children. The police reports provided some of the missing children’s last names, and the savvy art fan may have seen some surname shout-outs to Wayshak, Correia and Fish. There was also a lost child named Jeremy who had a fear of spiders. I hadn’t realized that Alex’s skillset also included clairvoyance…

The exhibit was less nightmarish than I’d anticipated. Perhaps it was the running humor that kept things from getting too dark. Probably the heaviest imagery was in the installation. A monitor in the belly of an enormous and deformed teddy bear contained video of a little girl stuck in a monster’s stomach holding a sign that just read “Mom.”

Beyond the framed ink-on-clayboard pieces (the triptychs include police reports and S.O.S. letters for $800-$1500), there was also a series of smaller black and white ink-on-clayboard monsters ($250 each) and some large-scale acrylic, latex and ink canvases ($3,000). The tremendous Teddy Roosefelt plush and video installation was not for sale and a couple plates of children cookies were freely digested. (“Embrace your inner monster: eat a child.”) Giclee prints and copies of Alex’s book were available for purchase.

By 8PM, a good-sized crowd was in effect and included Bay Area artists like Attaboy and Jeremy Fish (whose Barbary Coast solo show filled this space last month). Click through a hearty dose of thumbnails below, but if you’re anywhere nearby, go over to Fillmore and see it for yourself. Letters From Digested Children runs through January 29th.