:: AIB MFA Alumni

Jeff Badger | Fall 2005

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My paintings and installations feature absurd monsters that bound through the impossible worlds of cartoons, science fiction and video games. Through intense color, scrawled line and palimpsestuous surfaces, my work evokes and intertwines unexpected narrative elements from popular culture. The constantly morphing cast of characters is akin to the dark allegories of Carroll Dunham and Philip Guston and the brutish hordes of Bosch and Bruegel. They can be hopeful, single-minded, abrasive, stoic, pensive, manic, ecstatic and scared as they fight, eat, pine for love and cheat - just like us. Their interactions imply relationships but confound identification.

By creating iconic figures who act out miniature dramas of human struggle, I hope to present an opportunity to look humorously at our own actions from afar. This work depicts a world of never-ending exigency, where there is found both hope and doom.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION