She-Ra: Princess of Power, along with Jem and the Holograms, were forerunners of the Saturday morning girl-power cartoon block. The lead heroines frequently flipped between two seemingly diametrically opposing personas: She-Ra was the goddess-bitch alter-ego of Princess Adora, and Jem allowed Jerrica Benton, record label owner, to prototype upon herself holographic technology for pop music domination. At a time when women wore the power suit to navigate the still rocky 9-to-5 corporate terrain of the 1980s, these were heady, proto-feminist messages for millennial women: the Dressing for Success drag show, if it were, of understanding the difference between private and public personas that arguably continues today via our SnapChat or Instagram accounts.
Adrienne Crossman, a Toronto-based visual artist, has been riding on this kaleidoscopic nostalgic trip, re-contextualizing scenes from She-Ra as well as My Little Pony and Power Puff Girls in a series of GIFs and video installations as a critical exploration into the media products of these trademarked girl-power cartoon franchises. “I feel like pop culture’s really rich and has such an influence over the way we think about the world in a way that you can just brush it off as fluff but it’s actually such a symptom—such a representation— of the current mentality,” she explains in an interview.
And this GIF — curated earlier this year in Whippersnapper Gallery’s Sidewalk Screening programme — is a rapid cut focusing on the unicorn of her faithful steed, Swift Wind (née Spirit), and a mandala into that universe. It’s a journey into commercial breaks, Made-In-Taiwan plastic dolls, read-along book and cassette tapes — the merchandise artifacts that became the IRL extensions of the fantasies we were bought and sold.
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