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Email PageWarbabies
April 17, 2008- May 30, 2008
Reception: April 17, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Chris Scarborough
Foley Gallery
547 W 27th St Chris Scarborough Ecstasy (2007) |
In this recent rendering of graphite drawings, Chris Scarborough acutely examines his generation’s attraction to, and his own personal fascination with the icons of eastern popular culture.
Scarborough first encountered these foreign idols as an adolescent growing up in southern United States, in the Japanese anime, Akira. The artist marks this introduction as significant to his visual lexicon, as the film’s bizarre and unfamiliar imagery impressed deeply upon him with its strength of both magnetism and repellence.
The series “Warbabies” centers on a theme of cartoon violence, through the graphic employment of anthropomorphization: the idea of endowing non-human entities such as weather or weaponry, with human attributes. In the Japanese religion Shinto, there is a parallel belief in kami: a spirit or deity that inhabits both animate and inanimate objects. Scarborough sets these localized notions side-by-side to observe both how they are defined and how they cross, in culture, in context, and in narrative.
Working with idealized images from the east and western pop-cultures, Scarborough plucks his subjects out of their familiar, stable surroundings and thrusts them into the newness of one another. He tangles silky hair, airplanes and missiles up in the tentacles of a Jungian dream, and perfectly renders each smile on the faces of his Japanese beauties until they sour with ignorance, turn grotesque and inappropriate.
Chris Scarborough graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work has been included in Alarm, ArtPapers and NY Arts Magazine, and in New American Paintings. He has exhibited solo at Gescheidle in Chicago, IL, Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, GA, and has participated in group exhibitions in NYC, Chicago, LA, Washington D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Scarborough’s work is part of the Tennessee State Museum, 21C Museum, and the Tullman collections. He is a recipient of the 2008 Artist Fellowship for the state of Tennessee. Scarborough presently lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.
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