J. Otto Seibold Year’s Supply of Turtle Wax

Visitors to this exhibition entered a world of fleeting soap bubbles, zooming jet packs, excited detergent boxes, and funky drumming bears; this is the world of J. Otto Seibold. His work gained widespread attention with his children’s book, Olive the Other Reindeer, which he produced with author Vivian Walsh. As his website indicates, he continues to expand his personal iconography exponentially. His catchy style of squished turntables and lazy-eyed turtles has already become a design staple.

For MASS MoCA, Seibold created the collage, Year’s Supply of Turtle Wax. After papering a 55′-long wall with oversized prints, he layered the already intensely busy image with scribbled text, stickers, and dabs of Turtle Wax and tempera. The Turtle Wax threaded through the dense, dreamlike images and bound them together. As a boy watching game shows, Seibold was most impressed by the runner-up’s prize: a year’s supply of Turtle Wax. He imagined fleets of trucks pulling up in the driveway to deliver the great prize. Then, much to his dismay, he discovered that a year’s supply amounts to a single tin of Turtle Wax. Seibold invites us to revel in a world in which a year’s supply of Turtle Wax is delivered via semi-trucks, turtle cars, and backpack jet blasters.

As a boy watching game shows, Seibold was most impressed by the runner-up’s prize: a year’s supply of Turtle Wax. He imagined fleets of trucks pulling up in the driveway to deliver the great prize. Then, much to his dismay, he discovered that a year’s supply amounts to a single tin of Turtle Wax. Seibold invites us to revel in a world in which a year’s supply of Turtle Wax is delivered via semi-trucks, turtle cars, and backpack jet blasters.

J. Otto Seibold, A Year’s Supply of Turtle Wax (2001)