Culture Vulture

The Culture Vulture series continues my critique of contemporary western culture, particularly American culture. These works reflect the postmodern experience of an endless onslaught of images and information that influence the formation, or malformation, of identity. We are told how to look, what to buy, what to believe, who to fear, who to admire, who to hate. We are barraged – through text, sound, and images – with news, information, and advertisements. Juxtaposed and woven together is the slaughter of innocent civilians with the season’s newest fashion trends; the exploitation of laborers in underdeveloped countries with the stock market’s gains and losses; the lack of accessible drugs for treating the AIDS pandemic with testimonials for Viagra; the starvation of displaced refugees with fast food endorsements…and ultimately distinctions between the benign and the malignant are extinguished.

Utilizing this juxtaposition of the benign and the malignant, I selectively combine and recontextualize found images appropriated from popular culture, newsmagazines, advertising, art history, and contemporary art. The result is a critique of our current social, cultural, and political practices and their inherent absurdities and contradictions. Images that support the false notion that all is well are seamlessly blended with images that reveal the truth of pain, suffering, loss, and alienation. Formal clarity and technical refinement serve to heighten the tension between these parallel worlds of truth and deception. These photomontages reveal a culture increasingly immersed in complacency, unearned privilege, self-interest, sexism, racism, hypocrisy, lack of compassion, intolerance for difference, and thirst for power and control by the few over the many.