DisHollywood
Recently I stumbled upon José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros’s latest art showcase entitled “DisHollywood,” which finished its run in the La Luz De Jesus Gallery just this Sunday. The showcase depicts popular Disney cartoon characters in a slightly less family-friendly manner. Some paintings include Princess Tiana as a beaten up Rihanna, Alice snorting cocaine, and even Hercules using steroids. Ontiveros uses everyone’s shared perception of innocence in these Disney characters and flips it entirely on its head. In these paintings, Disney represents the whole of Hollywood and how things are not always glamorous as they may seem. Hollywood's appearance is only paper thin and underneath that flimsy illusion are actual human beings with their own issues.
It also reevaluates the idea of a happy
ending to mean something you are constantly working towards rather than a black and white endpoint. These paintings function as a tribute to celebrity culture and its
influence on our daily lives.
Although these images may seem
startling to some, these are very much in the style of most other paintings by
Ontiveros. In fact, this project is an expansion of Ontiveros’s “Disasterland,”
which depicts other Disney characters in a similar X-rated fashion including
Cinderella in Lady Gaga’s meat dress. I look forward to more thought-provoking and controversial art from Mr. Ontiveros in the near future.
What a shocking collection! I did a google image search on Ontiveros's collection after reading your post and an entire screen full of these types of images overwhelmed me. Although I do not enjoy looking at his work, I can't think of a better medium through which Ontiveros could have sent his message than through Disney. I think you hit the nail on the head when describing his message about the reality of Hollywood. I certainly agree that real life is not the perfect fairytale of a Disney movie. However, I don't think Ontiveros's very negative depictions give a thorough representation of reality either. These unfortunate acts are, no doubt, a part of life, but they represent the opposite spectrum from a fairytale which I think is also not quite a reality. I'm sure some people actually have lives that are like fairytales and some have lives that are very depressing, but for most of us I think our lives fall somewhere in the middle. In general, I agree with Ontiveros's message that life is not a fairytale and I think he did an excellent job portraying it, but his images can be quite overwhelming when your computer screen is full of them.
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