Le Caca Fraîche
Solo exhibit in the Ameen Art Gallery at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, LA from August 18th - September 12th.
Le Caca Fraîche
Expanding on my previous body of work called Magic: The Unravelling, I created this new series of work in attempt to create a dialogue between the consumer and the artist. My intention is to educate consumers on the material costs and time spent in the production of artwork. I paint on Magic: The Gathering™ cards as a way of recycling consumer products that inherently possess a small collectible value. These fantasy-based cards are played with and traded amongst enthusiasts of all ages with some of them having a dollar amount larger than $50.00. Most of the original cards used in this series are either common or uncommon and valued below that amount. I created unique images on these low-value cards, printed in the thousands and aren’t necessarily useable in gameplay now, to hopefully advance their value in more than one realm.
My personal history with Magic: The Gathering™ reaches back over 17 years. I played the game, collected the cards, and even dreamed about how awesome it would be if I were to create the artwork for the cards and what images I would paint. As time has passed some of the fantastical images that I once dreamed morphed into something more pertinent to our time. The images I’ve painted on these cards now touch on subjects of influential icons, social commentary, death, personal experiences, political propaganda, viral social media, environmental decisions, and biomorphic oddities, among other interests. Creating these images on such a small scale references the decline in human attention spans to real-life events over the past 20 years because of the use of texting, social media, and the internet in general, but my intention is that the intimate viewing space will be engaging on a personal level while potentially evoking empathetic responses.
I knowingly used the French feminine adjective, fraîche, in the title to present the idea of bilingualism and the play on words.
