Hookers and Autobots – APSU Downtown Gallery

The artist Robb Fladry worked for a time as a DJ, and the experience of remixing songs, of “taking two different records and making something new but recognizable,” has stuck with him. But instead of music, he is now mashing together the countless bits of pop culture trivia trapped in his head, in an effort to create new works of art representative of the world he knows.

“Movies, television and music are the building blocks for my generation,” he said. “I like to think of any viewer as a friend with whom I can talk to about a subject we’ve spent our whole lives passively studying.”

A new exhibition of Fladry’s work, “Hookers and Autobots,” opens on June 3 for the First Thursday Artwalk at the Austin Peay Downtown Gallery. The show, with influences as varied as the Rambo movies and the 80s television show “Family Ties,” runs through June 26.

“In the simplest terms, I consider myself as a remixer of popular culture,” he said. “I take existing contexts and references and filter them through my self and my equipment.  I’m not always looking to evoke a particular response or to ask the audience to take my side in any issue. I would prefer them to do what I do; to reevaluate how I see something I am familiar with.”

Fladry’s work has been exhibited at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the BEA Festival for Media Arts in Las Vegas and the Digital Fringe Festival in Melbourne, Australia. He earned a BFA in studio art and an M.A. in theatre from Austin Peay State University, and he is currently a graduate assistant at the University of South Florida, where he is pursing an MFA in studio art.

Last year, the APSU Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts leased a building in downtown Clarksville to provide gallery space for APSU alumni, such as Fladry. The gallery, located at 116 Strawberry Alley in downtown Clarksville, is open from noon to 4 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays. For more information on this space or the exhibit, contact Gregg Schlanger at 931-221-7789 or schlangerg@apsu.edu.

My Cat Is Cooler Than You

In this day and age I am not sure that anyone can go on with his or her day without interacting with the Internet in some way, shape or form – I certainly can not. To play into the fascination I have with internet phenomenon’s I tried to create an internet meme based on my cat Trinket. The website I created mycatiscoolerthanyou.com, is a blog where I could post cute pictures of my cat juxtaposed with sayings of how the viewer wasn’t so special. I created large format posters of my cat with sayings like “This Party Sucks” along with the website address and hung them in bars, hoping that people under the influence of alcohol would navigate their way their on their mobile devices and read about how a cat has it much better off than them. I continued with this work creating various imagery of my cat juxtaposed with off the wall sayings and also provocative poses with the word “meow”. Propaganda in the form of buttons and stickers were also made.

The “My Cat Is A Sex Symbol” series contain actual quotes from Hollywood sex symbols.

This was an ongoing project that ended because of Trinket’s untimely death on April 10, 2010. [September 2009 - April 2010]