Polaroids

Cary Loren's book alternates between snapshots of his entourage in Detroit 1970s and photographs of his elaborately staged collages, composed of prints, TV screenshots, covers of magazines, stickers, movie posters, ephemera, etc., as many of seemingly disparate visual elements unified through manipulation made on the Polaroid medium. Loren's works blend personal and mythological elements, mixing Christian iconography, pop culture icons, science fiction and film B-series, the golden age of Hollywood and the aesthetics of trashy magazine publications (The National Enquirer, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Screw) in perspective very unique post-Warholian. The Addams family rubs shoulders with celestial angels, Dante's Inferno rubs shoulders with cupcakes, the grotesque merges with the beautiful. Loren creates ecstatic pictorial altars of memento mori, indulging both with reverence and irreverence to his obsession with pop and trash culture, glamour, transience and death. This artist's book includes an interview conducted by the American artist Cameron Jamie in the cemeteries alongside the graves of Cary Loren's idols (including Vampira, Ed Wood Jr. and Jane Mansfield), buried icons of pop culture which constitute his biographical context. Work published under three different covers, distributed randomly.