Our animal minds, from an early age, are drawn to strange sources of power: the dead dog on the side of the road, the dirty magazine down by the creek, the gun in dad's closet. No amount of civilization can fully repress the impulses sparked by these talismans. The adolescent boy kneels and prays before these idols, scrounging pages of pornography from vacant lots or his father's underwear drawer, playing the gunslinger in video games to reenact news footage of soldiers at war. Proper society castigates the child for his hedonistic worship. I have built him a church. This subject matter must be approached with humor: not the mirthless harrumph of the cynic, but rather the gleeful snickering of Beavis and Butt-Head. As an investigation into our animal natures it is complicit. If my work dissects the baser elements of what it is to be human, then it also takes a bite of each organ it removes. And the viewer is implicated as well: my paintings will transport you inside yourself, to meet you there and introduce you to someone you’ve been pretending that you’re not. The immersive scale-up to 60 feet in width in some cases-of much of my work immediately encircles the viewer, defying the impulse to perceive the painting as an object. With a painting that extends past the limits of a viewer's peripheral vision on either side, the viewer is forced to relate to the image as an environment. This effect is multiplied as the painting is installed on a curved support, wrapping around the viewer like a nineteenth-century cyclorama. Working a large canvas as though it is a protracted military campaign, I strategize, maneuver, and fight to control territory. As the work progresses I remain ever vigilant for moments of completion: some figures are completed with my first mark, whereas others require meticulous layering of thin, transparent glazes to achieve the requisite color and surface. Their lurid, intense color and moments of drawing showing through transparent paint cannot entirely obscure the fact that my process has much in common with the most traditional techniques of Renaissance oil painting: thin, transparent glazes create deep, rich darks against solid, opaque highlights generally laid on top. Often I scumble opaque white acrylic gesso over a glaze of color to bring an area forward as a stark, chalky pallor, which stands in vivid contrast to an area of vivid luminosity. The population of my world is culled from the cast of adolescent fantasy: the sexualized female body, the glorified implements of war, the fantastic beasts of myth and history. I strip this loaded imagery of its burdensome layers of substantive meaning, laying bare a titillation that sets its hook directly in the viewer's prurient interest. It is a peep show for which the audience must also undress. Website: www.jeriahhildwine.com |
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| Living Dead Girls 1 | | | Living Dead Girls 2 | ||
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| Living Dead Girls 3 | | | Living Dead Girls 4 | ||
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