- Annie McLaughlin
"What things in American history do we long to get back to?" asks Annie McLaughlin. This was a question she mined extensively while constructing the images in her solo show at Open Gallery, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. Inspired by the resurgence of craft culture ("urbanites who are suddenly interested in basket weaving"), and the particular kind of nostalgia that leads you to Instagram your cool vintage Thermos on a camping trip, the paintings surrounding us reckon with the search for authenticity, while inhabiting "the blurred space between celebration and criticality."
In a color palette of peach and ochre, with oversized brush strokes and drop shadows meant to evoke painted signs along the highway, McLaughlin's work fuses an exalted American pastoral (wide expanses, Ansel Adams, things posted to Instagram without irony) and kitschy West Coast Americana (pink motels, Spaghetti westerns, things posted to Instagram with a large dose of irony).
"Why Do We Bathe? How Nude Are We? What Are We Even Doing, Dude?" gestures strongly toward Western art history's surplus of idyllic bath-time-in-a-clearing scenes, with 1970s SoCal commune vibes thrown in for good measure. The show also features a trinity of archetypal figures transformed into off-kilter avatars: a cowboy in "Twilight Wrangle (Where the Buffalo Roamed"), a potter in "Big Pot Boogie (A Cumbersome Burden)," and a shepherd in "Buddy Bucolic and a Lil Lamb, Too," each wearing a crooked, almost drunken-looking but utterly benign grin.
