Paul Medina

Roses and Thorns #17

2019

This wall hanging piece represents a blue heart with other organic shapes such as flowers and thorns. The artist uses clay, blue and gold glaze, as well as copper and velvet.

Made from a real pizza nestled in its original box opened using high-chromium stainless steel, the piece measures 16" x 16" x 21", weighs approximately 80 pounds and is an Artist Proof. The artist sees his creation as a reflection of the cultural distortions represented by memes, a statement he has expressed perfectly in his reflective, yet unevenly textured, medium. "You look at your reflection [in the piece], and it's distorted in the stainless steel." The piece was born in 2007, just as the social internet was beginning to explode out of the digital back rooms and onto the world stage under the watchful eyes of Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, and other popular platforms. But Big Sausage Pizza was conceived well before that, in the Wild West days of the internet when few truly public forums existed and media of every kind was most commonly shared via email. In those days one never knew what to expect from a link or an attachment and each click had equal odds of either brightening your day with a dancing baby or posing a risk to your computer, your dignity, or your relationships... and that was half the fun. Every recipient of these images, videos, or audio files suddenly had the means not only to pass them along to as many people as they pleased, but to change and individualize them before sending them on. In this way, the media very quickly mutated and were distributed around the globe. In other words, they became true memes. Pizza has evolved in much the same way. Like the internet, it started as an artifact of a specific culture, but today both are so common throughout the world that most of us can barely remember a time when they were special and exotic. Just as the internet simply IS, pizza also simply IS. We used to make pizza at home, or at least buy it in a place where they were handmade and offered a limited list of toppings. Today, the meme that is pizza is brought to our tables by an almost entirely mechanized process, and it's so wildly mutated that each individual has the ability to create a new twist on the old...

'We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...

'We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...