For this project, I loosely followed a business model from the world of fashion: that of making “designer replicas”. I worked in a painting style that looked very similar to that of Cara Ober, another local Baltimore artist. I used economical materials (acrylic wash on paper rather than paint on canvas). I signed my name to the paintings and included it on all printed and electronic announcements; I was not making forgeries or counterfeits, I was making knock-offs.
Some of the images and text were appropriated from sources such as free online clip-art sites, the dictionary, gardening magazines and an antique book on phrenology. Others, I invented. The work was shown in the lobby of a corporate building, as I felt that it was a perfect context for this body of work. The artist statement that I included in the press release was a fairly neutral one describing the paintings in terms of personal narrative and alluding vaguely to other issues I was interested in.
I was mainly interested in issues related to art-making and market forces: problems of intellectual property and the cultural commons, of authorship, of novelty, of the ethics of one’s studio practice, and of the ways in which a picture functions in a given context. Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, I was threatened with a lawsuit and in response, posted a new artist’s statement at the exhibition site discussing these issues directly.
While this project may have upset some people, ultimately I think it was a compelling investigation into the making of pictures and the making of the “meaning” of pictures through various texts.
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