The brief ‘Romo’ movement in the 1990’s was a short- lived moment in British pop. Bands such as Dex Dexter, Plastic Fantastic, Hollywood and Orlando looked back to the 1980’s new wave for musical inspiration and styling at a time dominated by white hetero lad pop. The bands involved never really took off despite being heavily promoted by the Melody Maker magazine, mainly because of their association with the New Romantics who had only just been toppled as the then dominant stylistic trend.

The appropriation of this pop movement as a research area within the work is a calculated use of marginalised yet somewhat embarrassing cultural material strategically used at the wrong time. The mixed signals that Romo sends out (80’s styling used during the 90’s) are used to question current systems of cultural reception and consumption.

Through a playful re-staging of a 1980’s Warhol/Basquiat/Sprouse aesthetic, Pollard riffs with daubed motifs and coolly selected silkscreen imagery, playing the roles of both Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. The chosen motifs reference red-herring identity politics, modes of retail distribution and past works from Pollard’s oeuvre, reconfigured within a dubious framework of self-representation.