The disquietude of objects becomes narrative and symbolic in the Ready-Made Dream project, which constructs a larger-than-life contemporary vanitas. Through the juxtaposition of objects of desire, a hyperreal, Kodachrome view of mid-20th century consumer culture emerges in our collective rearview mirror, fragment by accumulated fragment. The analog and digital are combined in a shallow, trompe l’oeilspace in which hand-painted passages merge with the ‘broken brushstrokes’ of the pixelated image. This installation work, and the artist book-in-a-box that re-presents the project in miniature, embraces the history of still life painting, draws on bedrock art historical images, ideas, and modes that include Marcel Duchamp’s readymadesand Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Columnwhile also picturing a familiar domestic universe of abundance, convenience and planned obsolescence found in advertising images. This tenuous illusion of the real is further ruptured by the inclusion of found objects that thrust out into the spectator’s space. Unplugged and silent, vintage telephones perch in the interspaces between pictorial illusions. On the floor, abandoned objects are scattered in photographically-created, faux-flooring that has been printed by a commercial graphics company. Unswept Floor I and II, like the floor mosaics discovered at Pompeii, are meant to be walked upon. And like a commercial billboard, the printed wall panels are signs that have no market value as art objects (the panels are not for sale). In the new synthetic image-space that is Ready-Made Dream, simultaneously contemporary, historical and a fiction, the transitory nature of life is presented as a contemplative experience - and like all vanitas images, delivers a cautionary tale.

 

Process

These are multiple media works that combine physical painting, drawing, photography and digital imaging that, when the images are constructed in computer, are then printed on vinyl by a commercial billboard company. Panels begin as gouache paintings for each of the ‘room’ settings. These are then scanned at high resolution, to which scans of more paintings by the artist are added digitally (ex., watercolor and color pencil drawings of fireplace logs, a generic abstract sculpture, and the artist’s 2D ‘copies’ after Brancusi’s Endless Column and Barbara Hepworth’s Wave) along with photographs taken by the artist of physical materials and objects collected (ex., family photograph in gold frame, refrigerator magnets, plastic fake play food, linoleum tiles, and an already completed now anonymous paint-by-number painting) plus collage materials from printed papers (ex., mid-century magazines, catalogs, encyclopedias and books). The wallpaper patterns (ex., “Woody” for Room with a View of Infinity, Extended and “Souvenir” for Early Sunday Morning in the Kitchen) were designed in repeat by the artist for the specific panel in which the pattern appears.