
Spotlight Artist
Whitney Oldenburg
MFA Annual
Artist Statement
I am interested in how an object’s meaning can embody the
unheroic, the anti-vision, and the kitsch, and how this in turn
becomes the setting for polysemous propositions. I see glimpses
into overlooked and unheroic objects, the “mess-ups,” as
potential proper nouns, as sites or heterogeneous co-presences,
and as possible exchanges of control, imbalance, repression, and
hopelessness. In terms of my process, I think of my surfaces as
terrains, armatures, skins, or containers. I seek to make work
that inhabits the mind and physically affects the body. Attraction,
repulsion, and abjection become band groupies, taste testers,
and weathermen in the world in which my propositions are born.
Artist's Additional works
Works shared by the artist outside of their featured New American Paintings selections


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