I love the artwork of LA-based artist 100% Soft.
One look at the adorable baby-like characters that populate his work and you know which immensely talented person is responsible for them.
He is one of those unique artists who not only has a distinctive style that is all his own but who is able to use it in endlessly inventive ways that never fail to delight.
In his latest series, which is currently showing at The Bottleneck Gallery in Brooklyn, New York (September 12-27), along with work by Glen Brogan and Russ Moore, he has taken the Alfred Hitchock-coined term “MacGuffin”, which refers to any key object in a movie that is key in explaining the protagonist’s motivation or moving the plot along, as his inspiration as he explains in this piece taken from Slash Film:
“I’ve always been a big movie fan, so I always jump at the chance to work with pop culture centric galleries like Bottleneck. For this show, I wanted to do something based around a specific, somewhat strict theme. While pondering that, I was doodling some illustrations of characters from Repo Man, one of my favorites. I started thinking about the Chevy Malibu carrying the alien body, and how it’s one of the more fun modern day MacGuffins. That got me thinking about some of the other more famous ones: Rosebud from Citizen Kane, the case from Kiss Me Deadly among others. So many of them have such strong visual representations, so I thought it would be fun to collect my favorites into a series. Some are fairly obvious choices, some a little more obscure. Some adhere closer to the classic definition of a MacGuffin than others, but they’re all in the right spirit.”
It’s an enchanting, enormously clever take on the concept of the MacGuffin, the theme of the exhibition of The Bottleneck Gallery, from whose website you can buy the prints and get more information on the exhibit; if you want to see more of 100% Soft’s appealing work, check out Slash Film.
