EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Janet Loren Hill
In stuffed canvases shaped like a binocular’s viewpoint, I paint surreal characters who play out propaganda techniques and warped ideologies from the past and present. The main characters in this series are the Chattering Teeth (based on the 1950s wind up toy of the same name) and their crowned followers. These noise makers are up to no good, misdirecting and fuming nonsense dogma. Humming from their vibrations, they churn inside fields of perceptual color built out of tiny marks of paint that transform into a merged color that is visible only through its optical mixture in our eyeballs. A color not actually present but the one we perceive. Springing from these color fields are plants I redraw from propaganda posters I research where the State has used the beauty of nature to mask their policies of fear and violence. Some of these programs include the Lebensborn program (Germany), Red Scare/McCarthyism (United States), Qanon (United States) and the One-Child policy (China). Trapped in a voyeuristic viewpoint, these paintings are set in concentric textile and ceramic frames that respond to the image within or further obstruct the viewer’s peripheral vision. Attuning us to this slippage of perspective, these paintings and sculptures act as tools to see what’s affecting our vision.
