Laurie Hogin engages with topics of continuing interest to her, including a discussion on the meanings of representation, beauty, the history of painting, and a critique of various other cultural mythologies. Representations of nature, animal life, consumerism, advertising and the media are all present. Laurie Hogin’s allegorical canvases of faulty fauna, mutant fruit and brand-loyal monkeys suggest the lavishness and opulent detail of the 17th through 19th century European traditions to which they refer, but these painterly flourishes and delicate details belie subversive cultural critique.
Frequently humorous images of snarling bunnies, fabulously feathered bird-creatures, mutant deer and fashion model monkeys are encoded with political and cultural messages that are meant to critique commonly held attitudes and cultural beliefs in our contemporary consumerist culture. Hogin contends that the history of European painting, since the rise of the merchant class in the 16th century, represents the history of Western attitudes towards the subjects depicted, including beauty, wealth, domestic life and romantic transcendence, as well as human dominion over nature. These attitudes persist, even as our means of representing them has expanded, and are part of our daily cultural currency. Hogin’s mission is to employ a seductive exposition of nostalgic, painterly celebrations of beauty, romantic allegory and pastoral idyll in order to reveal the ideologies in these visual forms.
