Michael Loveland
Gallery Affiliations: Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
Region: South
Inspired by antiwar posters, activist posters, Occupy Wall Street
protest signs, and hand-scrawled home-for-sale signs wired to
street-corner telephone poles, Loveland examines the power of
the individual’s voice in society. Working with mass-produced,
found graphics such as pin-up girls and rock posters, the artist
obliterates everything but the mouth, the vehicle of the voice,
through processes of masking and erasure. The resulting
expanses of open space surrounding the figures initiate a
dialogue between them—singing turns to screaming, a simple
smile becomes overtly erotic.
Evoking the figure, these works inform his more minimal
sculptures, which find roots in issues regarding false securities,
foreclosure, and abandonment. Like his early works, which
primarily consisted of groupings of color, like textures, and
combinations of unlike materials, the new sculptures focus
on unaltered everyday objects, questioning viability and value
through displacement.
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