Christmas in the Dark

‍

Plunged into the tyranny of Christmas cheer, it’s bracing to encounter a bit of art with a jolly edge, a dose of subversive grit during the happiest time of the year.

‍

Tony Hope’s latest show at Von Ammon Co., “Home Sweet Home,” is something of an antidote for the holiday-sick: The exhibition centers on a life-size, semi-dilapidated ice-cream-truck-from-hell representing the ride of slasher-clown Sweet Tooth from the circa-’90s “vehicular combat” video game Twisted Metal. It’s less sleigh bells and more slay-your-opponents. Here, saccharine frozen-dessert graphics meet psycho-clown motifs and fun-house-esque artillery—all topped off with a bulbous, flaming red-and-white clown head.

‍

“My interests and practice are based around the traumatizing images of my childhood and growing up around in the suburbs,” says the Detroit-based artist. Hope, 34, describes himself as someone who’s always felt compelled to “be the opposite of what I see.” He holds a MFA in sculpture from Yale University and was at one point designing sets for the Insane Clown Posse.

‍

Installed at the center of the otherwise pitch-black gallery in Washington, D.C., Hope’s truck slowly rotates 360 degrees as its headlights gradually illuminate 14 wall-hung works that, one by one, flick in and out of view. On one side of the space are seven acrylic-painted sculptures that replicate real Christmas-time cereal boxes from Lucky Charms, Rice Krispies, and Fruity Pebbles—plus an extremely “rare” design from Cookie Crisp. Opposite them are a group of seven new collages, each of which is an amalgamation of what Hope estimates is 60 to 70 found images conveying a demented vortex of consumer culture, blending glimpses of advertisements, logos, mass-market goods, the Saw franchise villain, and beyond. “Christmas leads to it,” Hope says of his driving impulse behind the collages. “It’s this really frantic scraping together of images from my brain and of anxieties of the times.”

‍

Of the many food products throughout the show, the artist explains: “Growing up, food was my family’s comfort and our addiction. My grandma, my uncle, my mom, my niece, they all have diabetes. It’s like a coping mechanism for our lives. We’re not drug addicts, or alcoholics, but we’re all definitely addicted to sugar. It’s this pleasure, then it becomes pain.”

‍

Tony Hope’s “Home Sweet Home” is on view through January 14, 2024 at Von Ammon Co. at 3330 Cady’s Alley NW, Washington, DC 20007.