If other satellite fairs were thematically sidestepping the recession -- "Let's be what art should be: uplifting," said SCOPE president Alexis Hubshman -- than the more open-ended, less cohesive tone at PULSE cleared plenty of room for recession-related art. Steve Lambert's Arrow Sign in Los Angeles, plays with the weird predicament faced by ad agents in the most heavily-recession-affected state: How to sell something when no one's buying. His "Out of Cars" (above) addresses the issue most explicitly. In a way, so does "You Are Still Alive," a piece which could be about death and life in any era, until one realizes that the photo is taken in front of a Veteran's Cemetery. And if nearly all of his work is recession-related, not all of it is pessimistic: His special edition of the New York Times ("Iraq War Ends") reads like a giddy, utopian edition of The Onion.
Closer to the entrance, the atmosphere of gloom is more jarringly announced by Jade Townsend's The Bellman, which "deals with the death of the American dream," in the words of the Iowan artist. The Bellman is part of a series based on the Lewis Carol poem Hunting of the Snark, and its aquatic setting suggests, perhaps, a lost-at-sea sense of disorienting drift.
Elsewhere, it was near-impossible to miss the Catherine Clark Gallery's exhibit, which wrapped around three walls, with images of the Iraq War, among other simmering internal and external conflicts. Most expansive was Sandow Birk's re-contextualization of America's founding document, Proposed Monument to the Constitution. "He was interested in the idea that the constitution is a living document," gallery owner Catherine Clark says, so he vivified it with loopy, serif-y fonts and margins flushed with detailed illustrations. More than that, he left plenty of blank space -- room for improvement in troublesome times.
