Jim Shaw: My Mirage

My Mirage (1986 - 1991) is the first major body of work by Jim Shaw, an artist from Los Angeles who started exhibiting in the late 1970s.Composed of nearly 170 pieces - each one drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style - My Mirage recounts the wandering of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 1970s. His is a story of unceasing failure. After an anxious childhood, Billy later withdraws from the guilt-wracked spasms of adolescence in order to lose himself in a psychedelic utopia, which soon becomes a nightmare. In the depth of psychotic hallucinations, he follows a woman who he worships into a pagan sect, before finally returning to the religion of his youth, 'reborn' as a fundamentalist Christian.From the onset of the series, My Mirage has been constructed with the idea of the book as model. Not only does the overarching narrative take the form of a coming of age novel, but many of the individual pieces make direct reference to a book format. Created in close collaboration with Jim Shaw, the book thus presents itself as the culmination of the artist's original project. My Mirage - The Book will allow Jim Shaw's ever-growing audience to look at the whole of Billy's story for the first time. Furthermore, its format and content should appeal to a wide readership, beyond contemporary art, which includes anyone interested in the history of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, American graphic design and popular illustration.