Laurie Hogin
Allegory of the Free Market, 1997, oil on canvas, 96" x 120", Courtesy: Littlejohn Contemporary, New York, NY and Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, Il
The meaning of the monstrous is critical to my work, as it represents a subversive moment in which the codes that define normal social structures and power relationships are disrupted, and that which is ordinarily repressed is present to the imagination. These codes and structures, common to the mythologies articulated in the history of painting as well as by contemporary visual culture, promise narcissistic transcendence, heroic individualism, the pleasure of the commodity fetish, and machismo, among other things, and waylay the threat of the abject, the undifferentiated, the deformed.
The animal monstrosities that populate my canvases and the languishing allegorical environments they inhabit are narratives of a warped world, and the world I refer to here is the one of my perception, not my imagination. The strangeness represents real agents of monstrosity: environmental degradation, sexism, extreme narcissism, self-inflicted disease, the imperatives of consumerism, among other things. My monsters are intended, with their gross-out humor and tendentious horror, to point to the apparatus of meaning that comprises the topography of our culture.
