Hollywood Squares Root Canal
From Abscessed to abscission
Artist Statement
My work is impious, irreverent, dark and delicious. It’s grim out there; I make fun.
My paintings are a combination of collage and acrylic paint constructed on a grid of squares These medium format works challenge the false mythologies of American cultural life including: the consumerist messaging of postwar American advertising, jingoist news media coverage and simplistic television narratives. My work presents an x-y axis of tongue-in-cheek commentary, a good warm blanket to ward off the current political winter.
This work references the famous tv game show of the same name, mass media entertainment that characterized the banality and hypocrisy of postwar America.
These pieces push the precious energy of early American hand sewn quilts through an Agnes Martin filter of precision, repetition and imperfection. This work subverts Hollywood humor, borrows from the domestic craftwork of frontier life and honors the measured structure of Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings. The work tells the story of postwar American cultural life as an unvarnished chronicle
These paintings cloak viewers against the icy chill of the fairytale renderings we’ve embraced about the postwar decades. Labels like “The Greatest Generation,” “Kennedy’s Camelot” and the “Baby Boomers" are really the names of the lies we tell ourselves. My work offers a balanced and inclusive version of history lest those lies calcify into hard truth.
These paintings take frontier homemaking to the doorstep of Agnes Martin’s groundbreaking gender challenge of male-centric abstract art to arrive at a cogent commentary on revisionist history where awkward realities were excised, buried or expunged.