Five BillyBoy* & Lala 2024 MDVANIIISMS Artworks
Shown for the first time at the POPA Museum in Porrentruy, Jura Switzerland in the retrospective exhibition named MDVANIIISMS, these five artworks combine 1960s and 1970s fashion and pop culture iconography with childhood’s wood blocks. They refer to a poem BillyBoy* wrote as a child on on American typewriter.
BillyBoy* as a child had almost no external relationships with children his own age. Therefore his imagination created play situations that gave him a vast array of colourful characters for his playtime.
These 2024 new artworks are based on BillyBoy’s childhood memory of how he played alone as child. He’d take magazines and cut out the pages with photos that resonated with him and placed them on the floor into elaborate geometric “streets” and fill them in with blocks and toys of all types to build a community, or an elaborate topography of the rooms in a doll’s house. It was with his dolls and bears he’d create scenarios of having a big family and friends.
Some of the images were selected and used by BillyBoy* for The New Theatre of Fashion exhibition in France (1986). It featured Barbie dolls from his private collection as well as dressed by Haute couturiers and designers.
