Execo

Visual media in all its electronic and printed forms (newpapers, magazines, billboards, street signage, film, television and video) have stimulated Ed Paschke’s work. In 1970, Paschke began screening Marshall McLuhan's 1967 film “This is Marshall McLuhan” for his painting classes. A pioneer in media theory who coined the aphorism “the medium is the message,” McLuhan’s theories impressed Paschke, as did the film's visual effects (especially the superimposition of colored gels on live action).

Paschke’s generic man-in-a-suit belongs to a series beginning in about 1977 that explored the characteristics of television and video in the 1970s and 1980s and how they affected human sensory experience by transforming and stylizing reality in very particular ways. Noting that the rapid acceleration of communications technology was expanding access to massive amounts of information, and perceptions of the world as a global media culture, Paschke manipulated the imagery in his paintings and prints as “a kind of orchestration of electronic impulses fluttering between 3-D and 2-D or substance and lack of it." Execo also parallels the developments in video art in the 1970s, which featured manipulated electronic signals, distorted pictures, superimpositions of images, and a psychedelic palette of electric colors as the basis of new electronic visualizations.