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Greetings from the American Dream

Presented by Riverside Art Museum at Riverside Art Museum

January 4-March 10, 2007

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The Riverside Art Museum is proud to present an exhibition of painting, photography, and conceptual sculpture examining the demystification of American consumerism in an exhibition titled Greetings from the American Dream. America, after a particularly intense postwar binge, started waking up to this landscape of consumption we’d made for ourselves. (The mid-1950s saw Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Dwight Eisenhower’s speech warning about the military-industrial complex, and the classic sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet.) Since then, we have continued our dreaming, but with at least one eye open. It is our artists who dream with both eyes open, and their eyes have grown jaundiced as they take in the Ameriscape. American Pop Art, it turns out, was not the uncritical regurgitation of our fascination with product and hype, but a sly deconstruction of our addictive materialism, or at least a reconstructive attempt to salvage something amidst all the stuff. Just as Bierstadt’s landscapes were the American Dream painting of the mid 19th century, Pop was the American Dream painting of the mid 20th – and the American dream photography, as demonstrated by the deceptively cool camera eyes of Ed Ruscha and Dennis Hopper. And today? Just more Pop? No, Pop with a twist, a neo-Pop more pointed than the original, a Pop for our neo-modern moment, a Pop that doesn’t even pretend to pat us on the head for being good little customers, but asks us if branding the landscape isn’t just polluting it in a different way. Some of this critical dreaming is a matter of skewed reiteration, déjà vu all over again, a putting of inartistic phenomena in the context of “art.” Cindy Craig’s hyperrealist rendition of a department store jewelry counter, for instance, tells you nothing you don’t already know, but as a painting re-states it in a way you didn’t anticipate. Some of it is a matter of subversion, modifying the originals so they pass (harsh) judgment on extra-artistic matters at hand. Wayne Coe, for example, proposes model kits that relive some choice moments in the Iraq war. Some of it is a kind of magic transformation of the mundane, going all dreamy without losing the sinister tang. Tracey Snelling’s photo-constructions imagine quiet neighborhoods in big cities, each bungalow a peaceful pool in a busy sea, and Dean Larson points his camera deadpan at the coziest and most anonymous locations. Some of it is a recycling of obsession, as in Ray Beldner’s paper-money confabulations, transforming the moolah into the artwork it buys, or David Buckingham’s neo-Warholian visual mantra on the almighty dollar sign. The American Dream is a landscape and a thingscape and a peoplescape, a paring-down of what is seen in reality – as in Donnie Molls’ desert-spare groupings of people and trees and objects – or a ramping-up of the noise in our visual culture – as in Jay Merryweather’s rain of commercial logos falling on individuals or Greg Miller’s signposted, billboarded painterly survey of the lay of the land – or a view of the landscape befogged by material itself, as in Timothy Ernst’s glitter-flecked western scene. D. J. Hall’s seemingly celebratory depictions of poolside life, every babe of every age bedecked in the requisite sunglasses, are pointed in their very innocuousness, and Sean Duffy’s LP collection – itself recycling a technology that is oh so last century - loses the music for the image of the musician, “artists” pimped by an industry that could barely care less about “art.” Greetings from the American Dream was organized by Riverside Art Museum curators Andi Campognone and Steve Thomas and will be accompanied by a full color catalogue with an essay by Senior Curator Peter Frank. This exhibition is supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation. For more information please contact Christine Jesson-Valore at cjesson-valore@riversideartmuseum.org The Riverside Art Museum, located in downtown Riverside, occupies a National Historic building designed and built by Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan. The Riverside Art Museum is a 50 year-old, private non-profit cultural institution that offers diverse contemporary fine art exhibitions and programs to serve the inland southern California region.

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    Riverside Art Museum

    3425 Mission Inn Avenue
    Riverside, CA 92501

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  • Dates & Times

    Dates:
    January 4-March 10, 2007

    Times:
    10am - 4pm
    Thursday 10am - 8pm

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