Nobody wins, but you have to chuckle at ‘Poll(Itics)’
Ted Cruz as a shirtless, tattoo-covered sexpot. Bernie Sanders in diapers. Donald Trump with a face that’s all mouth. Hilary Clinton without a nose.
You could just Google your way to all these images during the zaniest election year in memory. But it’s more fun to step inside the brightly-lit shipping container that holds Apama Mackey Gallery in the Heights, where a show called “Poll(Itics): A Documentation of Decision 2016” takes aim at the insanity in an exhibit that also holds more expletives than we can publish — even online.
If there were such a thing as a political convention for the humor party, this would be its gift shop — rigorously nonpartisan, poking fun at all sides with posters, prints and other objects Mackey found on the Internet.
A vivacious Iranian-American who has lived in the U.S. since she was a small child, Mackey said she had to fight the urge to omit messages she didn’t like. “This is about how everyone’s feeling,” she said.
So the sexy Ted Cruz poster, designed by a Californian she describes as “a super, super Republican wheatpaste artist — so not the norm,” got prominent placement.
“I didn’t want to show too much favoritism one way or another,” she said. “Now Ted’s kind of hot to me, even though he’s not hot to me! I’m like, yeah, you’re gun sexy! It’s terrible,” she said with a chuckle.
Mackey has operated a gallery since 1997, persevering through a divorce and years of other jobs while she also raised two sons, who are now 14 and 16.
She built her Heights space with a small cluster of shipping containers about ten years ago but rented it out to a sculptor for a while, until she got back onto her feet financially. She’s been selling insurance now for five years — self-employment that turns out to be pretty simpatico with having a gallery. Clients love coming to see what she’s got hanging at the gallery, she said.
“And it’s people who would have never looked at a gallery show before. For them it’s kind of cool.”
In a connected container Mackey has placed her small, non-profit Museum of Drawing, which currently features a show by California’s Panik Collective that subverts famous record album covers.
She’s created a “memorabilia wall” for the “Poll(Itics)” show with small framed prints she grabbed from the Internet, clustered around a larger reproduction of one of Yoko Ono’s annual peace-themed ads from the New York Times.
“So this is all of the chatter, and the thing we want, which is just peace,” Mackey said. “We didn’t make anything up. We just printed them, stickers about Isis, Hamas, Ruth Bader – I love her, I’m a Ruth Bader girl — Black Lives Matter, bathroom peepers. Laws on women’s body parts. Hillary mad about Bengazi. People saying they’re going to move to Canada.
“It’s about everything happening today. ... We’re crazy people! Look at us, all the things we fight over.”
The collection is hung so that, from a distance, it looks like a map of the United States. The piece that comprises Maine is an image of a Confederate flag that, instead of stars inside the blue X has a crescent moon and star motif — a Muslim symbol.
Mackey was surprised to discover that Soheb Javaid, the guy who designed it, lives in Houston and works in IT. She found the image on a Facebook page.
“Someone who used to live here moved to New York and posted this sticker and said, ‘Hey, Sohab, I love this sticker but I found myself having to peel it from my computer. Because if I’m in a coffee shop now and people see it, I’m worried. I hate myself for peeling it off, but I want you to know this is the most genius thing.’ So I’m, like, who is this dude? I friended him on Facebook one or two days before the show, and he showed up with that sticker.”
A cousin of Mackey’s — an American-born engineer who designs playgrounds in San Diego — inspired the show after she had a passport photo made, wearing a head scarf, and posted it on Snapchat with the hashtag #trump2016.
“She knows my humor. I had to have it,” Mackey said. “I do love brainiac people, and this mix of artistic confusion … . It makes my world go round.”
For the show she also found packing tape that reads “Black Love,” postage stamps by a liberal Houston artist railing against gun violence, blatant political messages on underwear and T-shirts. And she found a Trump piñata on Etsy.
A series of beautiful letterpress posters from Church of Type in L.A. that features all of the year’s political stars is among the show’s highlights, so long as you don’t mind a certain four letter word.
Three intricate woodblock prints by Tim Hück — the only participant Mackey would consider a fine artist — illustrates mayhem in Ferguson, Mo.
“I love his work, and he’s very topical,” she said.
One of her favorite objects is a Black Lives Matter sticker with a nasty hand gesture embedded that can be seen when you hold the piece up to light.
Mackey plans to save it for her sons, she said.
“I want to be able to look back and laugh at it all, and say, ‘This was really a thing.’”