MAN’S BEST FRIEND

Art Gallery of Ontario

MAN’S BEST FRIEND 2014 acrylic on paper This work is a massive gridded rectangle of 50 black and white line drawings. The width of the work is about 3 king size mattresses and it is almost one and a half mattresses high nearly reaching the Gallery ceiling. Each framed drawing is 22 inches tall and 18 inches wide. The grid is composed of two dimensional line drawn characters from Peanuts which resemble Snoopy, a familiar comic strip character which is a Black-spotted white beagle and Snoopy‘s friend, a small bird named Woodstock. In each of the close-ups the character’s eyes are replaced by x’s, in KAWS’s trademark X shape. Recognizable in the paintings are: the spiky feathers on the top of Woodstock’s head, Snoopy’s water bowl, the side of Snoopy’s head and floppy letter U shaped ear, Snoopy‘s short pointy tail and back foot as he walks upright, the top of Snoopy‘s head with a Mountie hat on it, his black dot of a nose, and his up-curving-line wide smile and various extreme close-ups of his eyes marked as an X. The wall on which this work is hung and two adjacent walls on either side are covered in outsized black lines that look as if they were made with a giant black pen that leapt off of one of the drawings and danced around on the walls with explosive energy. Nearby on either side of the work are sculptures called SHARE and TAKE. On the left is SHARE. SHARE features KAWS’s “Companion” Character standing holding another character dubbed “BFF” which is toy sized and dangles from it’s left hand like a stuffed animal. BFF is bright blue and resembles Sesame Street muppets like Cookie Monster or Elmo. It has bulging eyes atop it’s head with x’s for pupils a round yellow nose and a fuzzy frame like a soft toy. On the right of the grid of drawings, in the opposite corner, the sculpture titled TAKE swaps the two characters; a large BFF stands and clutches a small toy sized COMPANION character to its chest.