Damian Loeb (b. 1970)

Executed in 2004, Can’t You Take A Joke is a monumental work from Damian Loeb’s virtuosic appropriation practice. Rejecting the term ‘photorealism’, the artist digitally manipulates photographic and cinematic sources, altering brightness and tone before reproducing the image in hyper-real painterly detail. In doing so, he aims to shed light on the relationship between memory and second-hand imagery in a media-saturated world. Can’t You Take A Joke is based on a scene from John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween. Like many of Loeb’s sources, it represents a fleeting, non-descript moment that few would associate with the movie. The work was included in the artist’s solo show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2006.