Details/Media Release
hitting the wall

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For Immediate Release                                        Contact: Cora Bettcher

Opening Reception:

Hitting the Wall



Through painting and wall installation I hope to confuse messages encoded in the popular media while addressing the role it plays in day to day interactions.  My environments are inspired by Mannerist distortions in color and anatomy, Pop Art, and Surrealist modes of free association and engage a play of signs recalling the hyper-real networks we navigate daily.

Recognition, alienation, aggression, and submission reflect some of the mental states experienced as we seek to find ourselves through others and illustrate the underlying foundations of my work.  Masses of figures culled from advertisements and fashionable leisure activities pointedly allude to streams of diversions intended to temporarily satiate our desires and expectations.  In both envy and admiration of the supermodel or super athlete, the subject of my work twists and contorts so as to identify with the impenetrability of the ideal.

The wall designs give the structural and symbolic context to the individual's physical anguish within a preexisting system.  In this case the system is both internal and external.  Internal, because the sculptures represent both the Pituitary and the Adrenal glands releasing hormones into the bloodstream.  External, because the circuit boards from which the wall designs are drawn from come from communication devices such as cell phones, etc.

Hitting the Wall alludes to an athletic vernacular expression referring to a state of euphoria, a sudden surge of endorphins, experienced under extreme physical activity.  This brief feeling of release and surrender brought on (if only chemically) through the agony of the body serves as a metaphor in my work for a quest to identify with the real through the unavoidable media-un-reality.   The wall in this case also refers to the ever shifting gap between the viewer and the performer, between the real and the ideal.

55 TH S TREET S TATION    5582 N ORTHEAST F OURTH C OURT    M IAMI , F LORIDA    33137   305.801.1047