Bleak Pop / A three act exhibition / Introduction

What happens when an artificial paradise is abandoned? When the architecture of the economic boom all of a sudden are left to neglect, decay, poverty?

The bleakness fades the colors, the bright lights become sad, opaque reflections, the once busy streets have no hope and lead to nothing. This is the same space that years, maybe decades ago gave birth to projects and dreams, where deals and contacts where sealed, where existences were in full bloom. These are houses and villages, squares and monuments, lights and gardens, cars, buses, bicycles.

Those places have been slowly vacated, maybe for a sudden crisis, maybe because it was less a paradise than it appeared in the beginning and all of a sudden life leaves space to the desert, to the void, to a silent distressing sickness. Houses and streets are left empty but someone left behind a picture, a note with a telephone number, a book or a kitchen tool: small things that advise the fact that not a long time ago there was life in here.

Graffiti appear on the walls to leave a mark of the people who came after to lurk into other people's lives, small communities survive in the middle of nothing, all the rest is empty.

Bleak pop portraits a world of abandonment, traces of architecture left in far and sun dried places: landscapes framed between Illinois, California, New Mexico and Arizona from the artist and photographer that works under the moniker of A mad tea party during never ending bus and backpack rides along different corners of north America.

The Bleakness of the abandoned places is powered by the gloomy lure of memories and becomes the main character of a study in between artistic interest and anthropology. It becomes the mirror of a generation that leaves behind without many regrets all that is not needed right here, right now. The project of A mad tea party is graced by the collaboration with Geep 374, young street artist from Cagliari that reworks some of the photos with a mixed media of stencils and acrylic. The landscapes gain a new dimension with objects and details that bring the photos into a dimension that is even more dreamlike and surreal. The american dream, dusty and silent.

Francesca Mulas (journalist) 

Bleak Pop is brought to you by :

www.amadteapartyphoto.com

iacokitchen.blogspot.com/

geep374.tumblr.com/