"MetaDada"

While its title may spark images of Big Brother listening in on your phone calls and squirreling away your emoji-filled texts for safe keeping, the City of San Antonio’s Arts & Culture department’s group show “MetaDada: High Art for the POPulace” is not about metadata (literally “data about data”) but a fusion of concepts and practices associated with the Dada movement and Pop Art. While the hallmarks of Pop (appropriation, mass media imagery, repetition, loud colors) have never truly fallen out of fashion, Dada is less common in conversations about art and therefore remains somewhat misunderstood. Born in Zürich, Switzerland’s Cabaret Voltaire in the middle of World War I, Dada took cues from abstraction, cubism and expressionism and spun them into anti-war, anti-establishment messages rendered in a wide array of media (performance, visual art, poetry and graphic design among them). Subversive, surreal and intentionally bizarre, the movement positioned itself alongside the radical left, abolished logic, broke the rules and commented on the meaninglessness of life circa 1916. Drawing lines between the two creative movements, “MetaDada” showcases 11 accomplished locals (Ana Hernández-Burwell, Jason Ibarra, Michael Menchaca, Kelly O’Connor and David “Shek” Vega to name a few) working in mixed media, mural painting, collage, printmaking and points in between.