Show Pony

A contemporary art exhibition by Kelly Milton.

Show Pony is a soiree of new contemporary visual arts, inspired by selecting historical artworks, pivotal to the artist’s career development, and creatively disassembling, and recontextualising them, into a current aesthetic context.

Fanciful utopias, dramatic depictions, sentimental notions and fairy-tale tragedies are recontextualised, to forge and create new visual scenarios, dispelling the underlying essence of grandiose self-gratification of dominant cultures, by artists, and hierarchical sentimentalities.

Eerie and insightful overlays, and the intertwining of contemporary interpretation and imagery, disrupt the niceties of the once-idealised compositions, and separate intended themes from their original contexts.

Artworks such as Jean-Baptiste Pater’s Fête Galante (1730), and Death of Cook (1781-83) by John Webber, undergo paradoxical aesthetic and thematic ‘artistic surgery’ and enable the works to take on board new meaning, and an engaging, contemporary re-positioning. 

Image: Kelly Milton, Hanging around.., 2023, digital print on glow in the dark surface