The 63-year-old Playboy media empire has been in the news as of late, between the magazine’s major retool and dropping of nudity to the recent sale of Hugh Hefner’s Beverly Hills Playboy Mansion. To process the iconic brand’s place in pop culture, the art gallery Slow Culture is staging a group show featuring 20 Los Angeles-area artists, each presenting work inspired by the questions of culture, sexual politics and images of the idealized American lifestyle raised by Playboy.
Artists included in the show, entitled Playboys and Girls, work across genres and media, including illustrators, photographers and even a tattoo artist. Many of the pieces engage with an idea of re-appropriation of images from a brand built, in part, on the objectification of female bodies, according to a review posted by Be Street. Other themes include the extensive literary tradition of the magazine, long celebrated as an outlet for work by writers from Vladimir Nabokov to Margaret Atwood, and the idea of the global icon of the Playboy logo. This is definitely not just an excuse to pin centerfolds up on the gallery walls.
Slow Culture launched in 2013 in a space in Highland Park before moving to their current location in Chinatown, amongst the burgeoning community of art galleries, shops and new restaurants.
Playboys and Girls is on display until September 24 at Slow Culture, 934 North Hill Street, Los Angeles. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday from noon to 6pm and Sundays noon to 4pm.
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