Augustus Cross
Bio: Augustus Cross Mackenzie
Born 1991 - Washington DC
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: The paintings are about making pictures. In an attempt to capture specters of the mass imagination, they approach an industry of spectacle from behind the scenes, with a focus on reframing figures and arenas of Hollywood blockbusters as totemic idols and primordial landscapes in our collective experience. The work aims to give material weight to these apparitions in contrast to and in dialogue with their ethereal presence in digital media and the internet. This embodiment reflects the force that narratives of heroism, masculinity and capitalism exert on the symbolic order.
Taking the process of narrative production as a subject, I try to find faith in suspicion. We are creatures of belief, acting on spiritual impressions, and America is itself a series of mythologies. The contemporary speed and breadth of media makes idiots and experts of us all, as the flood of imagery makes mud out of meaning, and we become archaeologists in the trash heap. Mass becomes might in the media soup and truth or fiction is conditional on a sign’s role in a larger field of belief–a swamp ruled by an economy of advertising that manufactures consent, desire and demand. Is there any wonder at the popularity of such grim icons of nihilism, desperate fantasies of super heroics and the apocalyptic visions of an empire in decline? A cynical subject is a self assured subject. Why so serious?
L to R: The Colonists (11 x 15”, Ink on collage, 2017); Battleship set (I12 x 9”, Ink, gouache on collage, 2017); Hope st. (60 x 46”, Oil, marble dust on canvas, 2016)