Addressing very relevant themes of religion, death and consumerism, Brent Birnbaum’s mixed media works are a wonderland of lost pop iconography. A veritable hoarder of irreverent objects and tzotchkes from the oft-forgotten annals of American advertising, Birnbaum‘s work re-purposes these signifiers of a culture obsessed with materiality at the expense of meaning.

Wryly acknowledging predecessors such as Rauschenberg and Duchamp, Birnbaum’s found objects pre-date the Internet, yet eschew the idea of “randomness” by the enormous volume of collectibles that would have taken an obsessive collector years to amass without contemporary technology.

Tapping into his generations’ tendency towards an aesthetic of sensory overload, Birnbaum re-interprets allegories of heaven and hell from Christianity and Islam, drawing heavily from sources both ancient and contemporary; texts from the Koran to Dante’s Inferno are infused with a fresh visual language by utilizing the very propaganda our consumerist culture employs as a diversionary tactic.