“The question always comes up: who’s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?” asks Paul Pfeiffer in Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom. At times disquieting and at others downright creepy, but always powerful, the work on show at LA’s MOCA Geffen marks 25 years of Pfeiffer’s multi-disciplinary practice and is a fascinating survey of the Filipino American artist’s work in digital imagery.
Interrogating ideas of spectacle, belonging and identity, the curators at MOCA, Clara Kim and Paula Kroll describe the retrospective as exploring “the complex intersections of worship, obsession, and desire that shape mass culture and manipulate our collective consciousness.”
