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Curator's Statement Sarah Staton's paintings, or "Anti Paintings", as she calls them, are all made with a process of applying bleach to denim, and each is emblazoned with an icon, word, or phrase. The phrase, "How the West Has Won and Lost", an image of a Macintosh raincoat button, the words "Krazy", "Katz", and "Harvest". Her piece in the Dikeou Collection, Endless Column, features the image of a Dagwood sandwich, a "between the bun" totem pole of Fast Food, reminiscent of those Dagwood demanded from Blondie. While each of her paintings have a deliberate bleach spillage factor that is certainly a nod to Pollock, the glib, iconic, words, phrases and titles, recall word painters like Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool, the Pop imagery of Claus Oldenberg, and most overtly in her title, the Modernist master sculptor, Brancusi. The "Anti-Paintings" often begin in gouache studies, as in Gertrude Stein, and some end up becoming full fledged installations, using the same cultural and semiotic alphabet of commercial segues we have come to expect to infiltrate our consciousness. In their execution and materials, Staton's work utilizes the American "canvas", jeans and text in an almost advertisement-like manner in order to represent a more universal landscape full of signifiers of youth, rock, urban, and country culture. Staton's work cites our world culturesÕ language and iconography from both high and low genres, with humor and formality that resonates in both our social history and arts. In other words, "there is no there, there", in the "two all beef patties". Sarah Staton curated a project in zingmagazine #15, "a sample from the tru-blu series", and co-curated a section with Pauline Daly in issue #4 of zingmagazine, entitled "In and Out of the Blue". Devon Dikeou |