January 13, 2018
Pip & Pop made their U.S. debut at downtown Los Angeles gallery, Corey Helford Gallery with ‘Here Comes Sunshine’. Tastefully complimenting a body of work by Japanese artist Hikari Shimoda, the gallery was peppered with flicks of ‘kawaii’ spirit, sprinkled atop mushroom-trees, candy mountains, sugar-tulips, and other inventions of an angsty-la-la-imagination. These playful yet meticulously crafted islands of sweets speak to ideas of dreamy nostalgia, youth, and material abundance. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the never ending-loops, the happy-eerie giggles, the laughter-chant-songs of the rainbow gang – the spirits that inhabit this little universe.
Pip & Pop combines hundreds of pounds of colored sugar, artificial flora, craft materials and found objects. The result isn’t a utopia as much as it is the surface-level representations of one. It’s a place of illusion, wish-fulfillment, and of course, folk stories – folk stories being whimsical mythologies of (mis)fortune and forewarning. Specially, ‘Here Comes Sunshine’ references two mythologies: Luilekkerland and the Land of Cockaigne. Both are lands of plenty. Both are made entirely of food. Both are places of eternal satisfaction, where your desires are always – and at the same time, never – fulfilled.
