roll! stack! fold! break! (old man yells at cloud)

Inspired by depictions of the physical newspaper in popular culture, the print-based sculptures in roll! stack! fold! break! (old man yells at cloud) by Pudy Tong, play up the notions of superficial knowing and tenuous materiality. The veneer of mimesis falls away when these haphazardly recreated newspaper props are brought outside the context of the screen, revealing them to be incomplete fabrications whose verisimilitude is merely convincing when played directly to the camera. In a similar way, many aspects of news construction today, with its high-definition aesthetics, unrelenting chyrons and superimposed narrative arcs, belie the murkiness, slowness and relative flatness of the stories that are being told.

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Pudy Tong’s (he/him) memories of his immigrant childhood are punctuated by the images of large stacks of Chinese newspapers landing on his family’s doorstep every two weeks, shipped from Vancouver to a small rural town in British Columbia. His print-based art practice draws on elements from journalism as the subject through which our experience of contemporary, media-saturated society is refracted, reinterpreted and reimagined. He received his BFA from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. He works out of Open Studio in Toronto and spends just a little too much time scrolling Twitter.

Image list (prices on request):

• two stacks (Chicago 2002), 2022, printed newsprint, approximate size: 12” x 13” x 7” each
• a roll (BoJack Horseman 2016), 2022, printed newsprint, red rubber bands, approx. 23″ x 3″ x 3″
• folded (Charlie’s Angels 2019), 2022, printed newsprint, approximate size: 8” x 2” x 12”
• breaking? (It’s a Wonderful Life 1946), 2022, printed newsprint, newspaper bat, approx. size: 14” x 18” x 31”