Brandlands

Ecosystems of industry, commerce, desire and identity shape the lay of the land.

Brandlands addresses the meanings of landscape, still life, and portraiture in the context of the systems of production, communication and consumption that characterize our era.

Landscapes have always provided us with a moment, a scene, a visual representation of the ecosystems and economies that produce them. They represent "nature" as it is defined by the culture as well as depicting a landscape altered by history and shaped by cities, highways, parks and other manifestations of human activity.

Landscapes also provide us with the settings for our fantasies and desires, be they imperialist, heroic, erotic, apocalyptic or pastoral. The landscapes in Brandlands represent environments where the machinations of industry and commerce, and the seductive, transcendental fantasies suggested by retail display, package design and advertising have altered the very nature of nature. Pastoral vistas of farm and field are in fact scenes of industrial agriculture where genetically modified organisms are coaxed into vigorous excesses of reproduction in order to produce high-fructose corn syrup and feed for beef cattle, for whom corn is not a natural food, requiring use of antibiotics. Among these fields, exurban subdivision construction sites, where farmland topsoil is scraped off and transported for use on golf courses and urban parks, are the backdrops for the appearance of imaginary, metaphorical monsters in the garden whose skins sport the colors of construction and hazmat signage. Woodlands, preserved as forest parks within urbanized, industrialized Illinois, are the habitats of hybrid, reptilian creatures, magenta bunnies, blaze orange deer, and turkey-like birds whose markings mimic those of the brightly colored litter that blows along the roadsides. These scenes are painted quickly, from life, in sizes and numbers that refer to snapshots, mimicking a tradition that celebrated a long-lost belief in a pure Nature and suggesting both the economic and political forces underlying the landscape, but also the narratives we write over them, the stories we want to believe about the Nature of our desires.

Portraiture encompasses all those pictorial histories that involve describing a personage. Psychodemographics is a term describing a consumer according to her purchasing preferences as determined by the way advertising, retail display, packaging and other manipulations of desire help products define identity by suggesting meanings and even narratives. "Allegory of Psychodemographics" is a portrait of my family according to the brands we buy. Monkeys are icons of imitativeness. In medieval times, they also represented human sinfulness: Lust, avarice, envy and temper. Combine these characteristics, and they stand for brand-loyal consumerism. My monkeys sport brand-specific colors and patterns on their fur. They are the colors of packages, logos, advertising materials, and websites. You can tell a great deal about us: There is a preponderance of organic, fair trade products (progressive politics; way too optimistic; perhaps deluded), low cholesterol, heart-healthy and whole-grain products (fortyish), NPR, PBS, BBC, NYT (educated and hoping to be informed, perhaps deluded), sunscreen (white), and a variety of girly products that come in pretty, gaudy packages.

Still life is a collection of objects arranged and depicted to suggest a particular narrative. Still life, portraiture, and landscape are combined in the collections of animals, flowers and fungi in the apocalyptically titled painting, "The Last Place on Earth". They are allegories, suggesting narratives based on their characteristics. Flowers are associated with optimism, beauty, and love, and have a symbolic language where meanings are determined by species, but these flowers resemble cartoon plastic flowers from the 1970’s. They sport slogans. They are exaggerated icons of false sentiment and artificiality. The mushrooms are giant, covered in pink polka dots, like cartoon toadstools from a Disney fairy-tale woodland. Fungi perform an astoundingly precise and necessary function in an ecosystem. They break down dead organic matter; along with bacteria, they facilitate the recycling of nutrients. As such, they are both agents of renewal and evidence of rot. Read as allegories, they tell stories of corruption and revolution. Allegorical animal specimens sport the colors of our globalized economy, from the day-glo hues of big-box store commodities to the pixilated palettes of television and the Internet, as well as the colors of nationalist identity and political affiliation. an imagined nature’s literal embodiment of contemporary conditions. Each species is an attribute of the human psyche—hard-wired parts of myself and my fellow-creatures: The maternal monkey, the cold-blooded reptilians, the hapless rabbit, all altered in their very essence by human politics, unregulated industry, unbridled commerce, and war. The human skull is a reference to vanitas still lifes—paintings that offered gentle chastisement for the viewer’s attention to material life over the spiritual, even as the paintings themselves reveled in the material. The color is simultaneously symbolic of these modern horrors and vulgarly seductive, bright, loud, and tacky. Both Kant and Goethe said that such colors were degenerate. Kant said that beauty resides only in line; color is mere charm, and Goethe said that bright colors "excite women, children, and the savage races" and that "men of taste" will prefer shades of white. Chromophilia, which is characteristic of me, is literally a love of color. It is also a scientific term that describes cells that absorb dye well. To extrapolate, this is a metaphor for life forms that absorb the conditions of their environment.