I Paint the Body Electric Th e
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Jack & Diane
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he subjects Christine Cannon paints are strikingly familiar; their faces remind us of our coworkers, our friends, perhaps even our family. Though clearly mechanized and artificial, her emotive portraits create an Christine Cannon
unease that invites the viewer to question the most basic of human relationships in the modern, technologically mediated world. Though the LaGrange, Georgia native now has a fulfilling career teaching art at Chattahoochee Valley Community College, the portraits began as a way to process the dehumanizing frustration of waiting tables amid the economic fallout of the Great Recession that began in late 2007. “I had these synthetic interactions with people,” she recalls, “Nobody was tipping. Everybody was upset. It was a hard moment.” As earnings slowed, savings drained, and retirement LocaL
Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the anime Ghost in the Shell, and Matt Groening’s Futurama. “This is why I really love Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide, we have this really intelligent thing that is created with a human personality, sentience, but it’s still created to do these menial, banal tasks, right? And there’s something kind of emotionally crippling for him
By Erick Richman
accounts vanished, she began to see more and more “perpetually unhappy” customers, some of whom exploited the power dynamic between server and customer “as a way to abuse others.” That’s when the robots began, first as simple sketches of the people she served, then growing into coloring books and, eventually, paintings. “They were a funny way of coping with the mundane despair of waiting tables, feeling like people didn’t see me as human anymore,” she says. The robots take on a new, yet similar sense of relevance in the shadow of 2020, with many low-wage employees being declared ‘essential workers’ and forced to endure not just the threat of coronavirus, but irate customers frustrated by restrictions, unknowns, and fear. Professor Erica Adams intended to give her undergraduate art students at Columbus State University a lesson on printmaking when she introduced them to Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation, a treatise on the relationships between people, symbols, and society; for Christine, the reading had a far more profound impact. “I started really considering synthetic experience” she says, looking into how we form personal relationships with the media we consume, finding her experiences reflected in her favorite Colonial Vacation works, such as Douglas 6
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with that. I was experiencing a little of that waiting tables because people don’t treat you like a real person a lot of times.” Marvin the Paranoid Android has a very human – in his case, morose – personality, just like the subjects in her portraits with their trinkets and companions. Futurama’s Bender Bending Rodriguez, a self-aware bending machine who steals and smokes cigars, was clearly influenced by both Douglas Adams and Baudrillard; her work was influenced by all three. “It’s almost like a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.” Her paintings are brimming with references waiting to be found by those with a similar “artistic vocabulary,” as she describes it. For example, the headphones of the coffeedessert-drinking “Frappé” are modeled after one of the earliest robots ever put on film: Maria the Maschinenmensch from Metropolis, a pioneering dystopian science fiction film released in 1927, roughly two years before Baudrillard was born. Her “Totems’’ series, the results of her graduate school experiences in South APR I L-MAY 2021