Joe Wardwell
Region: Northeast
My paintings integrate landscape, text, musical allusions, and
abstraction to investigate myths about “nature” and national
identity in the United States. The landscape images that I use
inevitably allude to an end or irrevocable change in “nature” as
we know it.
The large text fragments I use are lyrics from rock songs,
which are taken out of their original context to allow for new
interpretations that illustrate an alternative American cultural
consciousness. By inserting painted text into the landscapes,
I undermine the traditional heroic cultural connotations of the
landscape and suggest a different narrative.
Looking at America through the layered lenses of landscape
imagery, abstraction, political slogans, and rock lyrics, my
paintings invite a more contemplative, nihilistic, foreboding, or
oblique reading.