Coca-Cola sodas are no strangers in Atlanta and around Emory, where legend has it that no products of the “P---i” brand soda can be found within a one-mile radius of the campus.

And neither are soda cans, the banal items that are easily crushed and tossed into the trash.
But artist Greg Mike gives life to these commonplace items in a playful and imaginative way in his new exhibit, Popstars and Cokeheads, which opened Jan. 29 at the Kai Lin Art gallery in Midtown.

The Pop Art-style exhibit features 100 cans, including ordinary soda cans, paint cans and about a dozen 3-foot-tall cans, as well as skateboards, paintings, canvas panels and T-shirts.

Each face on the cans portrays a unique character and expression, and is a new take on Mike’s signature “Loudmouth,” the cartoonish image of a set of white teeth in a black-background mouth, printed with aqua-blue frames. The mouth seems to be laughing, but a chipped tooth reveals a playful yet cynical attitude.

The various faces range from recognizables such as Captain America and Felix the Cat to one-eyed monsters with fangs. The display is reminiscent of a kooky family reunion; the rebellious, chain-smoker face with stubble around its mouth, the doctor face with a surgeon mask, the nerd wearing broken, thick-framed glasses that are taped at the bridge and the one-eyed face with a vaudevillian mustache all look different from one another, but there is a similarity that ties them together. The faces have different personalities, but they all have the same droopy eyes — or eye — that make them look like they all had one hell of a weekend.

Mike, a New York City native and Atlanta-based artist, has a background in graffiti art and graphic design. His Loudmouth stickers can be found around various cities, tagging newsstands and power poles.

His artistic background resonates with the art in this exhibit, portrayed through the graffiti painting on skateboards and an art piece that meshes graphic art and a Loudmouth face together.

Mike submitted his art to Yu-Kai Lin (’01C), director of Kai Lin Art, a gallery on Peachtree Street that opened January 2009. Mike loved the gallery space and Lin loved the art, and so began the collaboration to feature the exhibit. Lin, a pre-med and music major turned piano teacher turned art gallery owner, redesigns the gallery to fit each exhibit’s personality.

For Popstars and Cokeheads, Mike painted one wall to give the illusion of dripping yellow paint and another with a green monster face featured on one of the soda cans — giving a full effect of his Pop Art.

“It’s the first time I haven’t had creative control over my own space,” Lin said, but it fits with what Lin tries to do with his gallery — provide a venue to expose local talent.

The exhibit, which takes about 40 minutes to walk around and ogle at each can, will be on display until March 6. All items in the exhibit are for sale.

Most underground graffiti artists, such as BNE, lay low and out of the public’s eye, cryptically marking their territory one tag at a time. Mike is no exception; not only is he a hard person to reach, but he also doesn’t talk much in person, Lin said.

“It creates an air of mystery,” Lin added.

Still, Mike seems to make a statement through his exhibit; each individualized soda can is eye-catching and colorful, yet has a mischievous and sinister face.

Popstars and Cokeheads is “kind of a wink to celebrity culture,” Lin said, as evident in the puns in the exhibit title: Pop (Art) stars and Coke (soda) heads. Although Mike’s style is modeled after an art movement from the ’50s and ’60s, the cans represent contemporary culture: each can is like a celebrity personality that Hollywood-crazed tabloids and bloggers such as TMZ and Perez Hilton obsess about, Lin added.

Mike’s exhibit is a nod to the Pop Art movement as well. If Andy Warhol’s multicolored silkscreen-printed images of Marilyn Monroe remain as iconic Pop Art pieces, then Mike refers to Warhol’s mass-produced work but with added flair. Mike takes commercial soda cans, spray-paints over the brand names recognized by the masses and gives them a new identity by hand-painting each mass-produced can.

At a cursory look, Mike’s exhibit of 100 soda cans with funny faces painted on them seem to have a mass appeal. The odd expressions combined with vibrant colors and his signature Loudmouth can all start to look the same, one weird-looking can after another.

But Mike’s creativity and attention to detail gives each can an edge that makes it stand out among a sea of equivalents — just like the chipped tooth.

— Contact Michelle Ye Hee Lee.