I have to admit, I have quickly become an MTV fan. Having recently discovered the joys of channel 90 on my television box, I feel I have gleaned a new insight into American youth culture. Watching shows like My Super Sweet 16, There and Back, and Laguna Beach (just to name a few) could best be described as being fixated on a car crash. How can I not stop watching such a STUPID and repetitive relationship mistakes made by the cast of Laguna? Why does this even make me angry just thinking about it? Superficial at their best, these shows reveal my own exploration into the conundrum of American MTV youth culture which has exploded onto the (inter)national scale. Americana has been transposed over to our little and absorbing nation, whereby transferring issues of globalization, and national culture onto our fertile and acidic soil. There are many means by which the art world questions such MTV culture, but Vancouver art darlings Andy Dixon and Landon Metz exhibition of their recent collaborative efforts reveals a sardonic and witty view of an increasingly global culture. Calling up an NYC and music-minded artistic aesthetic in their collection of line drawings and paintings, Dixon and Metz pen and felt artworks innocently suggest the impending doom of culture.

A series of numbered prints consisting of line drawings (done by Dixon) and characters (by Metz) with spray painted sections offer single sections of cultural identity and questioning to the viewer. An image of Mickey Mouse is the background to a figure of a mullet-sporting man, who calls himself the ?New American Icon?, is drawn beside a figuration of the American flag. Two archetypal images of American culture and Americana clash, representing contemporary culture wars. These prints take sections of culture and present them on a smaller and restricted scale, questioning single images with childlike innocence.

While the prints present archetypal images and poke fun at stereotypes, the paintings suggest large themes, such as the homogenization of global culture. With hip-hop reverberating in the background, the painting ?I Spray Ya Mamma Crib? makes reference to that horribly banal and base MTV show Yo Mamma hosted by Wilmer Valderrama. The face of said ?momma hater? is the backdrop for a series of random numbers, image and figures conglomerated together, and then spray painted over. The cartoon speaking box is covered by black paint, refusing the viewer the chance at having his or her mother slammed. In ?Blllaaattt?, a confusing and backwards depiction of a map lays out the background. Two housewives hopelessly scrub the dirty global floor as Lenin, ?lead singer?, looks over. Television signs, icons of big business monopolies such as Warner Brothers, parental controls in the PG signs and Academy Awards suggest the cultural Americanization of the world. Emerging from the center collage of figures, drawings and spray paint is a figuration of a moose, the icon of Canadiana. Bart Simpson watches over the world, sipping from a 7-11 slurpee container. Icons of North American culture and mass consumer society presented alongside Communist god Lenin reveal the corrupt nature of our society, hinting at the negative effect it has on the globe.

Dixon and Metz pursue vibrantly contemporary methods of exploring issues of national and cultural identity. Recurring drawings, such as the evil characters in that nostalgic Pac Man game, chase the viewers, always warning us of the impending doom and termination of our lives. It is as though the two mediums chosen, pen and felt, are at war, just as the opposing views of national and cultural identity clash. As the mediums battle it out, their fight is highlighted in the themes of the exhibition.