Edwin Smalling
Region: MFA Annual
I make slow, seductive painting with archaeological depths.
Conversant in the language of color, form, line, and space, they
are transparently layered amalgams of reference and meaning.
My goal is to keep painting relevant, not simply as an idle tool
of capital, the most convenient of value containers, but as an
affective vehicle of transformational experience. My paintings
are rooted in an American vernacular, harnessing iconography
distilled from the language of popular culture, intensely aware of
our universally networked and integrally dependent contemporary
experience and critical of the ways in which American cultural
hegemony asserts and extends global ideological dominance. I
am interested in the way branding imagery, designed to iterate
belief in an ever-improving tomorrow, is made a tool of ideological
oppression. I believe that optimism and aspiration, now primarily
tools of economic control, can be reclaimed, and that a recurrent
spirit of hope can be made manifest materially in an art that is
powerful, affective, and discursively eloquent.