Label Text
McCarthy has been an influential West Coast artist working for over five decades in sculpture, performance, film, drawing, and photography. He often casts familiar and cheerful characters from popular culture, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Disneyland's Pirates of the Carribean, in more sinister or unsettling roles, at times both humorous and frightening. Through his transformations, McCarthy comments on perceived societal norms, cultural myths, and human nature. He finds and displays the contradictions and traumas behind the American dream as fabricated by Hollywood and popular media.
This comical work, while comparatively peaceful, holds an edge that can be somewhat troubling. We see Dopey, one of the dwarfs in Walt Disney's 1937 film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, perched on the crate in which it was shipped, as requested by the artist for this series of seven heads. Each head in the series rests on a different crate, complete with the scuff marks of transit. McCarthy was ahead of his time in questioning the roles of art, and by extension museums, play in contemporary society. While questioning the reality of the world manufactured by Hollywood, McCathy does not the let the art world off easy. He brings high culture to a level playing field with the world around it.
Source: DMAC NEWS Sep Oct Nov Dec 2022
DimensionsOverall (sculpture): 16 × 15 × 16 in. (40.6 × 38.1 × 40.6 cm)
Overall (crate): 19 1/2 × 23 1/2 × 19 1/2 in. (49.5 × 59.7 × 49.5 cm)
Overall (crate): 19 1/2 × 23 1/2 × 19 1/2 in. (49.5 × 59.7 × 49.5 cm)
Accession Number 2022.17.a-.b
Classificationssculpture
EditionEdition 7/7 + 2 AP
Provenance(Hauser & Wirth, New York); Des Moines Art Center [purchased from the previous, 2022]
Paul Gauguin
1892, reworked ca. 1894
