Pop Spelled Backwards is Pop Derek Boshier An Alternative Survey of Pop Art from the 1960s 8/4/05 - 9/24/05 The Pop Art canon is often defined in restrictive terms. At its most narrow it has been reduced to five artists: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman and Jim Dine. This exhibition explores the outer limits of pop art, where it mingles with beat, funk, surrealism, appropriation art and abstraction and at times questions Pop Art's own ambitions. It's a darker, more shaded image of pop than we're used to seeing and it features works by Joe Goode, Derek Boshier, Ray Johnson, Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz, Robert Dowd, Richard Pettibone, Bob Stanley, John Clem Clarke, Archigram, Diane Arbus, Tony Berlant, William Klein, George Herms and Al Wong. The noir side of the show is embodied by a variety of works including Arbus' "The Backwards man in his Hotel Room" and a creepy yet cool 16-hand verifax collage by Wallace Berman. The connection to surrealism is most clearly seen in an homage to Magritte by Joe Goode in which the window in the picture is seen through a cloud-filled sky and not vice versa and in Derek Boshier's "Toys, Politics, Chance," a baroque accumulation of child's hand games boxed a la Joseph Cornell. A rarely seen collage by Archigram, the British architectural collective, illustrates the way in which pop art filtered into disciplines other than fine art. While Bob Stanley's "Trees #13" undoes the received notion that Pop Art was always in rebellion against its paternal antecedent abstract expressionism. Stanley's hyperreal depiction of black tree branches as seen in outline against a white sky was executed from a photograph projected onto the canvas. It turns out surprisingly to be a recipe for making an abstract expressionist painting--albeit an embalmed one. The lattice work of paint conjures up the drips and skeins of a Jackson Pollock as much as actual leaves and branches. Gritty, deadpan humor and the inclusion of objects from everyday life remains as good a strategy as any for making Pop Art--even in this show--as seen in Edward Kienholz' mute, concrete "Solid State" television and Robert Dowd's dry enlargement of a postage stamp. Of all the artists normally excluded from Pop Art shows none seems more deserving of renewed attention than John Clem Clarke. His monumental appropriation of George Washington as painted by Gilbert Stuart mocks through its embrace the grandiloquence of American art and ideals. It's an appropriation that transcends the insiderness of art about art by contrasting the gravitas of the original's palatial scale with the comically degraded paint-by-numbers surface. As a copy of a portrait about the father of the new painted in the midst of a cultural revolution in which crusty and oppressive post-war values were supposedly being swept away, this painting embodies the irony and skepticism found in the best Pop Art.