Happy Go Sad
By Jill Pangallo
In her latest multimedia, persona-based performance Happy Go Sad, Jill Pangallo re-creates the compound and often incongruous roles that people perform on a daily basis. Pangallo’s detailed, nuanced portraits oscillate between emotional and emotive polarities—funny and serious, happy and sad, tribute and observation—and endeavor to highlight what she believes to be an epidemic of denial and lack of self-awareness, both on a personal and public level, in the U.S. Universally familiar models and tropes—broadcast advertising, industrial videos and mainstream dance, amongst others—are referenced and subverted as Pangallo continues to explore the crossover between art and entertainment, as well the way humor functions within this interchange. Happy Go Sad employs a deceptively naïve aesthetic that purposefully highlights the performative rather than the technical, and leaves the audience floating in the liminal, and sometimes lonely, space between fantasy and reality.