Luggage Tag Sunset No. 3

"To adopt the stylistic characteristics of mass reproduction in a unique work of art serves to underscore its conventional nature, to advertise its status as a coded reprsentation. That quality is present in Coupland's Luggage Tag Sunset series as well. But here, the use of coded means of representation has been upgraded for the digital age. While Coupland retains Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, the majority of the pictorial field... is taken up by rows of horizontal bands of varying widths derived from airline barcodes. Yet those bands are even less convincing evocations of nature than Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots. If Lichtenstein's paintings present us with sterotypical renderings of sunsets, Coupland's work provides us with sterotypical Lichtenstein sunsets, a conventional representaion of a conventional representation that stands at three removes from the nature it purports to depict." —excerpt form Sara Doris's essay "Time Cannibal: Douglas Couplad's Digital Pop," included in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything, published in 2014 by Black Dog Publishing and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

At the core of Coupland's practice lies a fascination with popular culture. Not only does Coupland utilize the strategies of Pop Art by incorporating objects and images taken directly from everyday life, but he often passes these through the lens of new media. The result is a provocative synthesis of the common with the extraordinary, set in the here and now.