Tyler Sharpnack

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: https://tylerisnoone.com

City / State: Chicago , IL

My practice usually consists of large-scale paintings where elements of “violent” mark-making collide with signature cartoon characters. However, extroversions of appropriated imagery and anxious, introverted gestures trace something deeply personally and unnerving. I look for unpredictable moments between the content we consume as kids, revealing the themes of barbarism they contain. Though I borrow elements from children’s cartoons that identify with the 1990s, the characters are thrown into a realm seemingly absent of time, place, and reality. There is a violence that occurs that I translate into my paintings. My intention is to draw the viewer in to witness the aggressive nature of advertising imagery in paintings of violent atmospheres. There is an irony in the fact that most children grow up enjoying cartoons without really understanding what they’re watching. Archetypes of human behavior are embedded into the imagined personality, and in turn, the viewer, the child, picks up these patterns of behavior that ultimately inspires and shapes their character. These fragmented moments are taught back to us and re inscribed in real life.