Smile Politely

Robert McCann Artist Lecture

Parkland Art Gallery
Tuesday, August 2
10:00am in the gallery

Hans Habeger and Robert McCann:
Strip Malls, Superstores and the American Landscape


This exhibition of paintings explores a byproduct of American consumer society: the landscape formed in the areas surrounding strip malls and superstores. However, our featured aritsts construct decidedly different interpretations of these subjects.

“My paintings focus on imagery at once allegorical and absurd. I’m attracted to the number of simultaneous intentions and cross-purposes that can be acted out in a single painting,” McCann says of his work. “…The use of long running TV shows, cartoon characters, and folkloric monsters give the paintings a comic-tragic back story and functions as implicit critique of our fragmenting language in the information age. While each painting is about what happens between the four corners (the cast of ‘Cops’ invades the set of ‘Fear Factor’), they also deal with issues of personal mythology and the awkwardness of making a meaningful, singular image in a fast food culture.”

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Parkland Art Gallery
2400 W. Bradley Ave.
Champaign, IL 61821
217-351-2485
http://artgallery.parkland.edu/

 

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