ARNie!00
Installation exploring a ‘problematic fave’
I was commissioned by MIRROR Gallery, Arts University Plymouth to make a new artwork for their iteration of Many and Beautiful Things, an exhibition exploring youth and nostalgia. I returned my attention to an icon of hyper-masculinity, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnie has spawned thousands of fan art images and fanfic stories, and demonstrates the meme mutations of celebrity icons. Arnie has embodied many disparate ideologies; as body-builder, Hollywood star, signifier of the American dream, a figurehead of the political right, and as an environmentalist. The installation plays with replicating pop culture icons in a repeating wallpaper pattern, featuring appropriated fan art of Arnie, printed using bodybuilders’ tanning oil as pigment. An essential oil diffuser plug in filled with Malibu tanning oil reinforces the bodybuilder connotations. The work explores fannish desire - including reinscribing the myth of the fan-subject through fan art and fanfic practices; pre-teen bedrooms as celebrity-shrine - deifying the fan-subject via posters, stickers, and wallpaper; and 90s nostalgia - a yearning for the familiar during strange contemporary times.