Wherever you land on the love-hate spectrum of pop music, its melodic pull is hard to resist. Despite its critical reputation of being performative, overly sincere and, at times, all too much, it’s a genre that’s always lived on a knife’s edge — one that thrives not in spite of its many contradictions, but because of them.
At P·P·O·W‘s latest group show, Hope is a dangerous thing pulls back the shiny curtain of pop curtain and revels in its darker, more introspective underbelly. Inspired by the closing track of Lana Del Rey‘s 2019 studio album Norman F*cking Rockwell, the exhibition draws inspiration from the album as an elegiac portrait of millennial youth, late-stage capitalism and the strange calm that sometimes follows despair.
Curated by Eden Deering, the show assembles a fantasy band, composed of Kyle Dunn, Raque Ford, Paul Kopkau, Diane Severin Nguyen, Kayode Ojo, Marianna Simnett and Robin F. Williams — an “artist Spice Girls” of sorts, each channelling their own pop persona. Together, the works on view wrestle with the often conflicting tensions and dualities that shape our understanding of the cryptic yet ever-present figure that is the modern pop star.
Channelling early 2000’s optimism and digitally-wrought melancholy in equal measure, a shared reverence for camp, authenticity and the courage of self-reinvention pulse through the space. Williams’ glow-in-the-dark “Siri Serving” captures an unreachable vocalist mid-serenade, suspended somewhere between presence and illusion. In Dunn’s “Happiness is a butterfly,” which figures Del Rey’s album in its foreground, tells the story of a glass star whose longing to be beautiful is sobered by the stark, unglamorous reality encasing it.
Beyond pop music itself, several works tap into a broader sense of cultural nostalgia: for “In the Ocean, In Da Club, and In my Dreams,” Ford inscribes a failed Rihanna-Beyoncé fan fiction across luminous sculptural forms, while Ojo’s standout sculptures explore the seduction of fast fashion and disposability — all that glitters is not gold.
Hope is a dangerous thing embraces the contradictions at pop’s heart: the delusion that beauty, or the illusion of such, can save us, and the hope that maybe, just maybe, it still might. As Deering described, the show walks “the line between faith, hope and dream. There’s a resilience to just keep going and there’s something so beautiful about it.”
The exhibition is now on view through July 11.