Head Trip: The 80s: Photographs by Paula Gillen

American artist Paula Gillen staged and documentary images draw on cultural trends, sex, psychology, and fashion. Her photo book, Head Trip: The 80s is richly illustrated with 118 images. The volume commemorates Gillen's prolific early years, the 1970s and 1980s, which she spent living in Baltimore and Chicago. The city's cheap rents and urban-based art schools and universities made it a hotbed of artistic activity. The publication surveys several fanciful photographic series, which were made collaboratively in this community of visual and performance artists. In these humorously deep tableaus, meaning is layered in every editorial detail. Subjects don unbelievable costumes and pose amidst colorful, hand-made sets. Paula Gillen is part of the Pictures Generation of artists, whose approach to art is shaped by mass media and advertising. Her work appropriates the techniques of the mainstream in order to its subvert social-politics. Her influences are linked to a few different post-modern trajectories of art history, such as concept art, identity art, and feminist art. Read more