Feral Glamour

By Julie Durkin

Hollywood is an unrivaled influence on our cultural values. Fame, glitz, and glamour, can be directly attributed to the fantasy productions of this kind of media fiction. Writer Dennis Cooper states, in an obituary of Nirvana's lead signer Kurt Cobain, "American culture has reached a strange impasse, which is largely the fault of our pathetic educational system. It has left us intellectually undernourished, emotionally confused and way, way too vulnerable."

My erotic abstract oil paintings revel in psychological double meanings. They alternate between attractive and repelling; organic and synthetic, and challenge the viewer to see through the hypocrisy of hipness and the frivolity of spectacle culture. Ugliness - such as "heroin chic" - has been glamorized as the vacant beautiful drug look in high fashion magazines such as W, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bizarre. By implication, these media serve as sources of identity for the construction of nihilistic attitudes and gender roles. Hyperrealistic veils of illusion create as a projected reality, hide the truth of the interior soul.

I'm making sexy and alluring images that translate like sweet candy in colors filtered through beauty and spectacle culture. I'm using a hot and cold pallet of glitter, metallics, snakeskin, and makeup. I use paint in the same way that makeup is used. Vividly saturated and high key colors of deep glazes create a glossy and glittery layering of oil paint. Utilized in a visceral way, the paint is manipulated with dry and loaded brush, poured, slashed, splattered, ripped through, removed and smeared. Formally, arousing shapes are suggestive of the body, while at the same time describing the body.

The titles, are filtered through and taken from youth spectacle culture (my misfit generation), question images about society. Large scaled paintings scream for attention, show off their all-knowing attitude, while smaller pieces relate to an intimate process of body decoration and the small table-sized mess one makes when engaged in the process of evoking the Glam.