Transgressive fiction can be traced as far back as the Marquis de Sade. It is a literary genre characterized by graphic exploration of taboo topics. William Borroughs is another more contemporary writer that explored this subject matter. The novel Naked Lunch explores a parallel universe considered outside of mainstream conventions. Burroughs’ highly volatile hallucinogenic tale renders a junkie wasteland ripe with delinquent sexuality, and excessive drug use. While some of the images in this exhibition explore the topic of taboo explicitly, as in Henry William’s large drawing/collage, “Why She’s Heartbroken “, in other works it acts as a subtle undercurrent. It is within this act of overstepping limits that these artists form new narratives.

Many of the artists I invited for this exhibition are practicing illustrators. They are for the most part, our culture’s contemporary visual storytellers. They are challenged to interpret our most current state of cultural affairs. Many have been recognized internationally and hired for their ability to offer insight to editorial, narrative, and commercial marketing projects. Paging through American illustration annuals one can find some of the most compelling, resourceful, and provocative artwork reflective of our current epoch.

Where there are humans – there is a desire to share unique compelling stories. This desire has remained constant throughout history, and it is this need that is the foundational motivation for illustration. However what has changed is the content, or culture within the context of the narrative. New questions and themes arise within each epoch.

This generation of artists has been exposed to unlimited amounts of mass media and popular culture.  Their work alludes to many different themes and shared cultural references, yet seems unburdened by these clashing culture’s conventions. Inherent in the work is a sense of what is familiar and simultaneously strange or incompatible. Things don’t add up to our natural set of expectations. What is most evident is the artist’s ability to ingeniously transport the viewer to a territory filled with moral and aesthetic contradictions. It is their ability to salvage, mutate and build upon clashing ideology that demonstrates the logic and lunacy of being exposed to the unlimited amounts of debris in our current mass global culture.

As a result, the imagery is often arcane, as if you were not allowed in on the “secret”. It is this mystery that leads a viewer to more questions rather than answers.   The artists seem to freely associate, and remarkably blend together imagery that transmits opposing concepts. The faithfully charming and wretchedly grotesque commingle.  It is the marriage of these opposites that is incredibly resonate and genuinely memorable. It invites the viewer to want to be in on the furtive message, to revisit the image.

Cultural Transgressions

Images have the inherent ability to tell many narratives simultaneously, and are in large part defined by the context of shared cultural experience. In this globally influenced community, the presence of images saturates our every experience and they become a common language, a familiar backdrop to our life’s stories The imagery that has formed the scenery of the 20th century – pictures from children’s books, tattoos, nostalgic toys, science fiction, the circus, comics, monster trucks – are taken by these artists and recombined in such a way as to subvert the old comfort and familiarity they once gave us. The results are often surreal, ambiguous, humorous, strange, and compelling. These artists function within the perimeters of what is common pop-culture, while introducing us to cryptic inner-worlds, and it is this collision between the ordinary and the uncanny that forms the idiosyncratic power of their work. As a viewer, I am simultaneously lulled and disturbed; I am seduced into comfort at the same moment that I am called out of it.

At times the place these artists call us into is terrifying as seen in P Jay Fidler’s eerie juxtapositions of childhood imagery and dreams. Other times they may contain an odd contrast of elements, simultaneously inviting and sinister - as in John Hersey’s and Oksana Bakra’s cast of computerized characters. These artists force us to take a look at our complacencies, our normal expectations and invite us to participate in their world of quixotic misadventures and chaos.

Transgressions of the real

Many of these artists also play with notions of artificial and authentic – often evoking them simultaneously or operating in the space between the two. Our artificial fantasies are called upon and examined. As a culture we long for the translation of ordinary events into mythic fantasy. Film, comics, advertising, catalogs, and the general debris of pop culture easily show us views into other worlds, worlds that form alternatives to our immediate surroundings. Audiences flock to Hollywood blockbusters to be transported and escape from everyday ennui. The artificial, whether a karaoke bar, a video game, or a Sears catalogue, begs to be interpreted as the real. We seek to enter a controlled environment to gain comfort and a lack of astonishment while simultaneously seeking that, which stimulates and gives us pleasure.

We can simultaneously laugh and feel apprehension within Steve Klamm’s depiction of an atypical post-apocalyptic suburban family road-trip gone awry, along with the disappointing arrival of the unexpected alien savior. Distressingly, he begs the question; what exactly is in store for this helpless family? It seems harmless enough, but is it? It is this ambiguity that essentially evokes our curiosity.