Label
Label from 2014.Art for Social Change:
In Kontato, a hard-nosed police officer or authority figure of some kind stares out of the image, apparently at you, the viewer. With sunglasses on, he can read your face, but you can’t decipher his. In this context, the intense, neon colors add to the image’s threatening quality. The title is obscure; kontata is a Finnish word meaning to crawl on all fours. Paschke once described his work as “confrontational,” a word that certainly applies here. Associated both with Pop art and with the Chicago Imagist art of the 1960s and 1970s, his work often critiques what he apparently saw as the emphasis on sex, violence, money and fame in contemporary American culture