concession stand: new works by Shaun Richards
Exhibition Artworks
Jun 3, 2011 - Jul 16, 2011
Shaun Richardsʼ latest body of work is a meditation from within a dream. Icons and
spectres drawn from the American tale of the last half-century haunt these pieces.
Visual cues from lowbrow genre work — pulp, noir, porno — inflect a series of moments
and montages which, taken as a whole, begin to etch out the artistʼs ongoing psychic
negotiation of being in the twenty-first century. But the personal territory Richards mines
is rich with transferrable revelation. Through juxtaposition and accretion of figurative,
symbolic and textual elements, Richards illuminates the machinations of finance, desire
and violence that lurk behind the veneer of the everyday.
“Concession Stand,” the title of the present exhibition, is a play on words that points
immediately to the question of our complicity in and responsibility for the world.
Ultimately, the work interrogates the complexity of maintaining a coherent moral stance
in the midst of market systems that only want us to buy. Richards employs the language
of advertising, broad sloganeering and day-glo impact to draw us into dialogue with
often unsettling questions that get to the heart of what it means to participate in the
American marketplace of ideas, actions, and glances. Richardsʼ surreal landscapes and
scenarios, the product of his galvanizing admixture of figurative technique and graphic
gusto, conjure spaces within which we are asked to confront and acknowledge precisely
what we give up in our own perpetual quests to be who we think we are.
- statement written by Lincoln Hancock
