Common Love,
Aesthetics of Becoming
April 27–June 11, 2011
Marc Handelman
Tomorrow's Forecast: Strikingly Clear, 2008
Oil on canvas
74 x 58.25 in.
Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
In his work Marc Handelman revisits the nineteenth century romanticism of Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic E. Church. Rather than taking the pure, untouched wilderness as his subject, Handelman appropriates imagery of blazing sunsets from magazine advertisements for military and defense organizations. Handelman layers images of sunsets on top of a fragmented corporate logo, using a transfer process that is both additive and subtractive. The painting's title, Tomorrow's Forecast: Strikingly Clear, is taken from an advertisement for the defense technology corporation Northrop Grumman. Handelman's work taps into the original advertisers' desire to illustrate a level of control over nature, while his work nevertheless reveals nature as co-opted towards martial ends.