Michael Loveland

Gallery Affiliations: Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts

Region: South

Inspired by antiwar posters, activist posters, Occupy Wall Street protest signs, and hand-scrawled home-for-sale signs wired to street-corner telephone poles, Loveland examines the power of the individual’s voice in society. Working with mass-produced, found graphics such as pin-up girls and rock posters, the artist obliterates everything but the mouth, the vehicle of the voice, through processes of masking and erasure. The resulting expanses of open space surrounding the figures initiate a dialogue between them—singing turns to screaming, a simple smile becomes overtly erotic.

Evoking the figure, these works inform his more minimal sculptures, which find roots in issues regarding false securities, foreclosure, and abandonment. Like his early works, which primarily consisted of groupings of color, like textures, and combinations of unlike materials, the new sculptures focus on unaltered everyday objects, questioning viability and value through displacement.