Who's ready for summer? Starting Wednesday, the monitors and projector's inside London's Seventeen gallery will be burning-up with the work of four North American video artists. Yet, while their show, "We Like What You Eat," is a "micro survey" of outstanding work, it's not a question of who's "hot or not." In fact, what's more interesting about the show is that its venue all but proclaims itself "not hot" in saying, "In terms of exposure, the art gallery has been matched and perhaps even surpassed in importance by the website itself as an artistic platform for the included artists." It's true, the work of Paul B. Davis, collaborators John Michael Boling and Javier Morales, and Eric Fensler has simultaneously borrowed from the visual lexicon of the internet and blossomed there, finding scores of fans among the ranks of computer geeks and musicians as well as fellow artists and savvy curators. It's this crossover--or, rather, this practice of reciprocity--that binds the artists together in the show, with pop cultural phenomena flowing into the work as inspiration or source material, only to find it flowing back out as the art work itself becomes a part of pop culture. Call it the pop art visualization of the adage, "you are what you eat." The gallery declares this an all-out international movement that "nonetheless maintains its spiritual center in the United States of America." Fortunately, you can surf the artists' work from anywhere, but prepare your eyes for the optical poptitude proffered by these guys. In the words of ironically now-forgotten 80s pop musicians, Timbuk 3, their future's so bright, they "gotta wear shades." - Marisa Olson

Image credit: John Michael Boling and Javier Morales, "Body Magic," 2006 (video still)

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