"Toys are a perfect mirror of society, a perfect mirror of the lives people are living at a certain period; and therefore, you look into the history of toys, you are also looking back into the history of mankind."
Dr. Helmut Schwarz, Toy Museum Director, Nuremberg, Germany


Rick Anthony Diaz

RADDINGTON FALLS: CHILD'S PLAY

We learn society's value systems as children. In the western world, children learn values from the people that raise them and from the media, namely television, film and advertising. They learn to uphold these values through the act of playing with toys. Action figures and dolls engage in dialogue as children role-play stories, invented and re-interpreted from the media.

I use subject matter and materials that reflect the values of our mass-produced machine-age culture. I depict plastic toy figures using human-made acrylic paint on polycarbonate plastic. Materials are placed on both sides of the transparent plastic sheets, reminiscent of animation cells, representing the dual nature of our personalities. Various materials, drawings styles and genres are explored including street art, advertising graphics and cartooning.


SUBWAY SERIES

It's been said that if you want to know a culture, look at their advertising. A society's values and priorities are clearly exhibited in the print ads and commercials: the products that those ads are selling, and more importantly, how they are sold. The imagery they use reflects the societal norms and ills such as sexism, materialism and celebrity idolatry. Plastic toy heads pasted over the faces on subway platform advertisements suggests the cloning of the values we are selling to the next generation.

EXILE (FAMILY)

This wall installation combines photography with stickers of drawings. It is part of the series “Raddington Falls: Child's Play” which focuses on the values taught to children and how they uphold these values through the act of playing with toys. The center of this piece is a family photograph of Lego figures, capturing a moment in a narration. Family tension is heightened as one of its members is missing, or as the title suggests, in exile.

EXILE

Exile, a window installation in Williamsburg Brooklyn, is a collection of hanging polycarbonate plastic sheets transformed into an assortment of shapes. Light passes through the piece creating shadows and illusions, seen from the outside as well as in. An image of a walking Lego figure is repeated throughout, in a series of events like scenes in a graphic novel. The ambiguous narration runs from right to left as the figure passes from one moment to another. New symbolism is introduced, drawing inspiration from board games, fairy tales and from previous work within the series Raddington Falls: Child's Play.

BLOOD RED SERIES

These drawings explore different themes within the context of the Raddington Falls series. New and recurring imagery is experimented with as a means of deciphering whether they will be developed into further work. The drawings share a stylistic similarity in that black, white and grey colored pencils are combined with red paint.

CURRENCY SERIES

The Currency Drawings are a series within the series “Raddington Falls: Child's Play” concerning value systems passed down from adult to child - in this case, how we value money. The Currency Drawings were inspired by imagery on the front and back of the United States Dollar. The artist combined his own symbolism and hidden imagery with that of the dollar bill's masonic symbolism. They are numbered in the order that they were drawn with an olive green, celadon green, french grey, cool grey, black and white colored pencils. Proverbs and common cliches such as “Money doesn't grow on trees”, “Time is Money” and “Climbing the Ladder of Success” also served as inspiration.