Statement of Sarah D. Sutton

Urban walls covered with spray paint, stickers, flyers and traces of advertising messages create a tension between highly personal marks, such as graffiti and commemorative doodles, and commercial advertisements. The surface that the imagery rests on becomes less about any one image, message, or illusionist space but instead about the negotiation between visually disparate elements and history marks as well as between public and private messages.

In extreme consumer based capitalism as exists in the United States sometimes it seems that the human body is an accessory to colors, brands, objects and lifestyles and not the other way around. In my work I humorously reference a world where consumer culture does not exist at the service of the human race, but where wo/man becomes interwoven into the fabric of consumer culture and is inseparable from it; where the internal body is just as culturally coded as the external landscape. It is this negotiation between the personal and private and the internal and external landscape that my work addresses.

In my paintings formal relationships become more important than any other notion of function or logic. My references span many genres and I mix many different approaches to mark making within one piece. Using inks, airbrush, acrylic and gouache, I combine process-based, very loose approaches, with flat graphic text and representational imagery. Each approach becomes a strand of information that interweaves and overlaps and is subordinate to the overall ornamental structure. The end result is a maximalist style of painting: a labyrinthine of visual metaphors arranged for enticement and temptation, but which border on garish or grotesque.