Miss Bugs: Do No Harm Popsicles
Miss Bugs is a London-based street art duo composed of a girl and boy – Miss & Bugs – known for their colourful mixed-media works.
Style and Inspiration
Although Miss Bugs is a collaboration founded in the beginning of 2007 there is not much information about the artist couple. The only info featured on Miss Bugs’ website is a Pablo Picasso quote:
“If there is something to steal, I steal it!“.
The quote from one of the most important artists of 20th century best sums up Miss Bugs’ motto, as the artist pair takes iconic imagery from pop culture and art history and reforms it using different kind of various mixed media methods. Making their own newly reconstructed iconic pieces, Miss Bugs uses an array of techniques from silk screen printing to resin casting.
Inspired by pop culture, superheroes, art history, as well as the artists such as Piet Mondrian, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, Miss Bugs’ style is full of contrast – clean animations with dripping paint; colorful bodies with black and white edges.
Miss Bugs’ Latest Work
In Miss Bugs’ latest work, the enigmatic duo unveiled a new installation entitled DO NO HARM at Jealous Gallery in London. The installation consists of 900 vibrant coloured resin ‘popsicles’ that containing a range of pharmaceuticals critiques contemporary society’s obsession and consumption of social media.
Miss Bugs continues to draw on the theme of addiction to digital technology, and how over exposure to news reels and digital feeds can act as an anaesthetic and numb the sense of reality. Algorithms mean one becomes stuck in their own ‘echo chamber’, and can only gain access to content that has been externally chosen to be suitable for them.
This dark notion is ‘sugar coated’ in the aesthetics of the popsicles. Each lolly is made up of three layers of different coloured resin, in which a mix of surgical blades, Viagra, syringes and various painkillers are contained. In the gallery the pop art style lollies will be presented on mass in pharmaceutical orderliness. They will be sold in medical packaging, with instructions for application, how to store and a warning of the side effects.
The installation’s title Do No Harm is pulled from the Hippocratic Oath, whereby doctors promise to abstain from any intentional wrong doing to a patient. The irony of the statement is evident in today’s networks and social dialogue where we continuously self-harm and cause harm to others, in an endless loop.
Miss Bugs says: “The ice lollies represent the churn of the social network; the posed selfies, the frothy coffee top photos and the cute animal videos side of the internet that we all like to binge on, but inside it’s rotten and sick. Digital technology whilst being a sweetener in our lives perpetually distracts us with a constant, addictive stream of information and temptation. The internet becomes a space where reason and logic are trumped by fake news, and people with extremes of opinion can shout each other down. The candy on the outside sugar coats the sickness within.” Miss Bugs individually hand craft each piece and their artistic process is time consuming with unpredictable results. The process of mixing media and styles have led to Miss Bugs being deemed ‘Visual DJs’, who like their influences such as Gary Hume, Hannah Höch and artists from the pop art movement, remix, resource and reimagine pop culture.
Via Jealous
