Karen Sylvester will show canvases which glow with acidic, irradiated colors that suggest the screaming palettes of day-glo animation.
These paintings are made by combining photo-emulsions with oil on canvas. Her conflation of the techniques of these distinct media implies a critique of their assumed inherent qualities, and at the same time, she is suspicious of the methods of critique itself. Rendered in oils, photographic imagery loses all claim to "objectivity" and becomes frankly histrionic; by the same token, the "expressive" potential of painting is debased by its conscription to the process of mechanical reproduction.
Sylvester's iconography derives from anonymous photographs and grimacing cartoons. These figures interact in a vague celluloid dimension in which time and space are apparently collapsed. Veils of images are layered one over the other in a dense, chaotic melange. While Sylvester's paintings convey a sense of anxious placelessness, they also maintain a prevailing atmosphere of hysteria undercut by an acrid sense of humor.