PUNCH OUT !! LA

June 10-13, 2013
Opulen Studios
11am-7pm
1309 S. Flower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Punch Out! LA is the latest creative endeavour of the Vancouver contemporary artist Michael Edward Miller. Like earlier American Pop artists, and contemporary Takashi Murakami, Miller has taken the most base and overexposed elements of popular culture—in this case, Nintendo gaming icons—and brought them into the realm of fine art. Miller’s Punch Out is Pop for the digital age. His art derives its style from, and pays homage to, the visual activities and pleasures of his youth.

Miller’s large format paintings are not mere copies of video game design. Video games are his source material. Like artists from the late 60s onward whose works were inspired by film a generation earlier, Miller is inspired by the visual culture of his generation. It is that history that gives the work its cultural relevancy. And so much so that recently MOMA, Grand Palais, V&A and Smithsonian have set to collecting video games into their permanent collections and mounted block buster shows featuring the history of the video game industry. We need no longer question their influence within the visual arts. What is interesting is where Michael Edward Miller is taking it.