Cape Queer

Dave MacDowell’s work deftly combines satire, irreverence, and seething wit. A self-taught artist, MacDowell combines popular cultural references with the magnetism of the “dark hook”, creating unexpected plays on popular culture that inject the familiar with blistering hyperboles. Seeking to unveil the feared and the reviled, while expertly weaving critical commentary with hilarity, MacDowell’s work is an effective combination of complicity and critique. Appropriately in keeping with the movement, MacDowell’s pieces combine a pop surrealist aesthetic with deliberately recognizable popular cultural references gleaned from movies, cartoons, and music, among others, and transforms the known into powerful generational odes to discontent and dystopian irony. His work combines humor with criticism and an acerbic wit, unearthing the nightmares that lurk just beneath the veneer of celebrity culture and the cult of Disney. His work fearlessly taunts the obsequiousness of popular culture, and its iconographies, by creating unexpected inversions and re-combinations that gently tug at its unraveling strings. MacDowell’s technical execution is highly detailed and seductive, contributing to the hallucinatory pleasure and draw of the work. In keeping with the tendency of the genre, the more highly refined the execution, the more effective the irreverence of the content, and this certainly is the case Spoke Art is San Francisco’s newest art gallery and publishing house. Following a year of pop up exhibits in New York City, San Francisco and Oakland, we have finally settled down into our new permanent space on Sutter Street in San Francisco’s dynamic Lower Nob Hill neighborhood. We specialize in emerging new contemporary artists with a firm emphasis on figurative and illustrative works. Our regular exhibits open the first Thursday of every month, and we specialize in connecting collectors with secondary market works namely in the fields of pop surrealism, low brow and street art. Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted (with water) or modified with acrylic gels, media, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.