Visual Art

Several drawings from my Loopy Loonies series will be shown in an exhibition opening October 23, 2020 in Berlin at the Haus der Statistik titled “The New Normal?”:

Loopy Loonies, 35 x 35 cm, graphite on rag paper.

Loopy Loonies, 35 x 35 cm, graphite on rag paper.

Loopy Loonies, 35 x 35 cm, graphite on rag paper.

To see more drawings, click here.

The series Loopy Loonies explores the violence imbedded in the comic and cartoon imagery endemic to American visual culture. In the context of the present-day political disaster in the US, the formal language—which includes splats, speech bubbles, and animated letters of the alphabet—inquires into the ways in which a culture weaned on entertainment, superheroes, and happy ends loses its ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Art and Literature: A Conversation with Myriam Naumann on the installation “The Ethnic Chinese Millionaire”

March 4, 2019

Three Quarks Daily, Visual Art

Leave a comment

An image is described: a photograph cut out of the newspaper in which a raging crowd is in the act of plundering a millionaire’s home. In the foreground, an oil painting is held aloft by several people: it’s the portrait of the millionaire. The photo was taken in the 1990s, when ethnic Chinese businessmen living in Indonesia were rumored to have caused the economic crisis of the time and suddenly found themselves in danger. The narrator describes the photograph in painstaking detail; she literally reconstructs the photograph in words. What is the mental image that results from this description, and what relationship does it bear to the original photograph? It’s about the description of an image of an image here: a text about the printed photograph of a portrait painted on canvas of a man who has fled for his life only moments before—an oil painting that was destroyed seconds after the picture was taken.