paint. He might seem to celebrate it, but he actually doesn't quite trust the world of mass production and communications. His work implies a conviction that there is, or perhaps there better be, something genuine, something real, beyond the glam facade of throwaway culture. In Vogue Italia Stuart Semple discusses his critical relationship with Pop culture in a post Warhol society where it has become a universal language but aims to act removed. Semple discussed in his Guardian blog the influence of growing up in the 1980s and how that period is vital for our art, seeing "youth culture was a powerful force, bright, seductive and ultimately a lot less hollow". He comments about the rise of the new advertising class that has been replacing our social connections after Thatcherism by "associating products with personal empowerment" which was brought about by "a time of intense atomisation and individualisation to the detriment of community caused a pop cultural language centered around nurturing the ego." Topics of youth apathy were touched upon in 2014's "Anxiety Generation" exhibition where Semple debated that a risk industry keeps our current generation in a passive state of fear and consumption, not having a war or threat of nuclear destruction that our parents faced, but he feels "There is a misconception that the youth are apathetic, that they sit around playing on their Xboxes and are all connected digitally, not with the rest of the living world. I can't think of anything more active than going out and rioting," In 2013, Semple talked to Josh Spero about his career and influences as part of The ICA's Culture Now series. In 2007, when interviewed for Trebuchet Magazine, Semple described how his early experience of pop influenced his approach to art "When I was growing up in the 80s these things (cultural icons) were – I don't know if it's quite right to say they were aspirational, but they certainly gave me my first feelings of something larger. But as you get older you get more jaded so now when you look back at these 'nostalgic' things, you have lost something. Here I've tried to look at them again in such as way as to rediscover that sense of feeling" In 2013, the Suspend Disbelief exhibition wanted the public to question their relationship with reality and the way we all, in a multitude of ways, suspend belief to survive;