Jonas Criscoe
Friday, 14 August 2009
Work from the West Collection.
“My work depicts the new monuments of the contemporary American landscape – walled-in track homes, chain restaurants, and elevated highways. It explores how our ever-expanding consumer culture has shaped the environments in which we live. My paintings are shiny postcards that depict these monuments of contemporary America, reflecting the viewer’s own image back to them, blending them into the landscape, making them a tourist in an unknown yet familiar place, an environment where everywhere is nowhere in particular simultaneously.
Most of the works in this series explore the idea of the individual amongst a group of exact replicas-both in imagery and in fabrication. The fabrication methods that I utilized help to mirror the way in which many things in our society are produced, (rather than created), primarily for commercial consumption. This can be seen by looking at the materials that each of the works is made from: plastic, synthetic lumber, semi gloss house paint; to the techniques that I have incorporated in their production; silkscreen, stenciling, Xerox copying, and digital illustration. All of these elements combined help to depict the trend of homogenization that is so prevalent in the contemporary American landscape while also conveying the feeling of displacement and estrangement that this homogenization generates.” – Jonas Criscoe