My American Dream is a decade long project of creating images in a poetic nonlinear narrative that is both dreamlike (capturing dream space and time in installations that have larger intentions beyond the form and content of any singular piece) and the story of my own life with my husband in the larger cosmology of a United States and history that helped our life come about and to give us the freedom to be who we are and to help to others to hope and forge a positive and nurturing life full of beauty, love, and the pursuit of happiness.
In the 21st century, I believe in a have your cake, and eat it, too-plan, combining the subjective beauty and painterliness of modernity with the cultural relevance and narrative pertinence of postmodernity. If you could have the emotion depth and formal nuance of a Rembrandt, married to the populism (and politics!) of a Warhol, maybe you can create something new. Growing up skiing in Colorado and going to the Denver Art Museum, the great wanderlust in painted landscapes of the Rockies by Germans like Ufer and Hennings would intrinsically have a strong influence on my artistic life. At home, I discovered European illustration and underground comics, and their closeness to Grosz, Dix, Die Brücke and more that would help give my vehicles their expression. Fassbinder influences me by his use of melodrama to get his audience involved in stories imbued with feeling. He used this tension as a seductive agent to have viewers empathize and have compassion for avatars who have journeys through discourse, with ideas of both Marx and Freud permeating their worlds.
100 years since Duchamp’s Fountain, I think we can circle back to the unconscious, to notions of transcendence, the ineffable, and the sublime. After Richter, I want to penetrate the picture plane at the same time that I want to keep the content of the Pictures generation. For me, my images are Proustian madeleines, aesthetic talismans to form thoughts and feelings from my own life into the image, like James Dean’s method acting, suturing his own biography into his characters’ lines. Elvis never wrote his own songs, but used the lyrics and mood of his chosen melodies to cull something deep inside generating a moving voice that spoke not just for him, but also allegorically for generations. Turner turned towards the light of God when gazing towards the sun, producing Kantian transfixes of Romantic sublimes beyond the corporeal existence of his forms, Cézanne was able to project his unconscious along with his conscious brush when painting his Monte Sainte-Victoire thinking of his childhood with Zola. And the spirit of American modernity of Hopper, O’Keefe, Dove, Hartley, Burchfield, and Ryder dreams deep to my core, Leaves of Grass to my Walden Pond.
Images of our America go beyond our current state of affairs back into the world of nature, our Manifest Destiny continues to guide us in the age of the National Parks Centennial, showing us, that if you aspire to do something new, turn to nature. Our great leaders, the heroes of civil rights, make great sacrifices to strive beyond a subjective and subjugating Patriarchal Order, to lift up the spirit and agency of all peoples resisting the reification of Capitalism and Power, rebelling against oppression, creating a voice for youthful generations wanting to make a difference.
No one can really build a wall to keep people and life away from where all wants and needs to be. Borders, like artistic movements, are malleable glass ceilings that are made to be broken. Modernity continues to push through constructs by allowing our instincts, our synaesthetic feelings, to flow past how things might seem to be represented. When painting with a brush with oil paint you have the baggage of that history behind you, but you are also facing forward into the future. What other kinds of art can’t do as well, still, is make unconscious thought concrete and made visual within the plastic space of the picture plane—what leaks out (the ineffable, the uncontrolled, the ecstatic revelations, like Elvis’ gospel) become Gracelands not just of what can be, but where we can travel to become more human, sacred while embracing the profane.
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