Ordinary Vanities Jan. 21 - Feb. 28 (detail), 1999    Artist's Statement

For many years I explored ritual and ceremony through the contemporary iconography of installations, alters, paintings, wall-hung objects and solo and group performances. However, a change took place in my work during a summer 1995 residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I had long collected new and used gadgets of all kinds, and had come to recognize these utensils as the sacred icons of twentieth century America, a culture obsessed with consumerism. While in Provincetown, I frequented yard sales, fishing and home supply departments, flea markets and garage sales; my collection of "American utensil junk" continued to grow. In the studio, I began to study these eclectic objects and experiment with their conceptual and formal application in my artmaking. This process impacted my painting, printmaking and installations on many levels. A year later, during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, large painted images of everyday artifacts exploded onto the walls and ceiling of my studio: an enormous food mill surrounded a window that overlooked the northern California hills--its handle wrapped around the glaring, naked bulb in the center of the twelve-foot-high room.       The pervasiveness of tools, gadgets and utensils has a significant impact upon our identity as consumers, and certainly, the banal and formal presence of these mass-manufactured, utilitarian items has served as subject matter for artists since the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century. The household tool has, in fact, become so embedded in our lives that its familiar appearance and touch can elicit a string of associative memories, causing us to recall past people, places and events. Three objects that are fixed in my childhood recollection--an aluminum food mill, a circular retail clothing rack and a hot water bottle-are used in my work as metaphors for both personal and shared experience.       I continue to study and work aesthetically with a growing personal collection of mass-produced implements. These mundane, domestic, industrial and retail materials are stripped of their original functions and placed in new combinations and contexts. The resulting work is meant to convey my humorous, though critical, visual perceptions of the surreal, manufactured environment that surrounds us, and the social, cultural, industrial and retail economies that produce and market it.  -Karen Snouffer  Next Page-Introduction by Ann Bremner