Artist's work cleverly twists things familiar
By Mary Jessica Hammes - Correspondent
Published Thursday, February 04, 2010
Chances are, certain pop-culture references from your childhood or adolescence carry layers of meaning. Television shows, movie stars, certain toys or snacks - they become something else when you remember them. Sometimes they even carry a certain amount of reverence. Artist Jeremy Hughes perfectly captures that feeling in "Give the People What They Won't," a show of his paintings at White Tiger Gourmet.
Special Fans of the "Ghostbusters" movies will recognize Peter, Ray and Egon as they pose against an Art Nouveau-style blue and green wallpaper in "We Are Ready to Believe You."
There's "a moment of anxiety, a current of anxiety that's running through every single painting I've got," Hughes says by phone from Nashville. That is especially evident in his paintings that recall scenes from "The Shining" or the "Twin Peaks" Black Lodge, or even the extreme closeup of Helen Mirren's smirking face.
But there's also a lot of humor, too, and Hughes admits that. "I'm making these paintings for an audience that is basically my generation," says Hughes, who is 33. The result is "a really big inside joke."
Fans of the "Ghostbusters" movies will recognize Peter, Ray and Egon as they pose against an Art Nouveau-style blue and green wallpaper in "We Are Ready to Believe You." Hughes' loose painting style - "I take all the fanciness out of oil painting," he says - allows the Ghostbusters' torsos to fade into the wallpaper, making them look like ghosts themselves. (Winston gets his own painting, "Winston Makes A House Call," in which he stands casually next to a Victorian woman on a sofa that references the works of John Singer Sargent.)
The trio's pose is taken from their newspaper ad, as seen in the first film, but looks almost religiously iconic. Hughes says he meant to "venerate, canonize them in a superficial, funny way." The highly educated yet unemployed scientists also are stand-ins for struggling artists, he says.
Hughes himself graduated from the University of Georgia in 2006 with an MFA in painting and drawing before taking an assistant professorship at the State University of New York. He now lives in Nashville, where he anticipates an imminent move back to Athens.
Hughes' artist statement says that his work examines "imagery projected onto our collective cultural experience and the way in which we digest and ignore the resultant effect."
"The way I mix and mingle images, it's almost making fun of myself a little, too," he says.
For instance, in "Snacking Blighty," he pairs an image of Helen Mirren with a British snack made up of "fried balls of pork miraculously stuffed with hard-boiled egg," he explains, having spent time in England recently.
"Escape from New York" has an epic feel to it; you almost expect George Washington to show up on a horse. Women blaze into battle - one rides a majestic unicorn. Another is atop a red-and-white-striped zebra, wielding rolling pins and frying pans. Hughes says the idea came from a Tony Millionaire comic strip, in which a character envisions an all-woman army. Hughes decided to cast his soldiers in the image of contemporary female artists, including Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Maya Lin and Pipilotti Rist.
"I just thought it'd be nice to play with the stereotype," he says.
Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Thursday, February 04, 2010