ART Habens
Elise Broadway
of ‘Scarecrow Boy’ is drawn from a mixture of advertisements on American costume websites aimed at children. This selection of imagery is connected with personal experience growing up during the dawn of the internet during the shift from relatively ‘slow’ media intake to the immediate, distinctly marketed visual information we receive today. Through warping, re- organizing, and distillation of photographic images into a specific simplified language, I attempt to relate how a callous surreality is built up in our collective experience when encountering media on a daily basis. Even if I never utilize each of them directly, every photo I collect informs how I address a specific subject and I often spend extended time in the studio contemplating and narrowing down photos to precisely fit a narrative aesthetic. Over the past few years, I have broken away from traditional painting surfaces; I first collected packaging from food, household items, etc., but then moved on to collecting multiples of specific types of fabrics: most recently yellow household cotton dusters and commercially-aimed British tea-towels. I have always been attracted to the visual characteristics and tactility of objects, specifically those that can be seen and touched in the home or in a grocery store setting. All of the materials I utilize in my current work have either come from within my residence or local corner-stores, supermarkets, and hardware stores. Lately, I have been sewing these fabrics together to make a large matrixes and fashioning them into stuffed sculptural paintings. This movement away from the blank stretched canvas is essential to my narratives: a desire to break away from Western structures while still confined within a traditional identity. The materiality of the work, particularly the initial process of of collecting and using materials in unconventional ways, is a crucial
Special Issue
23 4 09