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Wild Fuck Crazed Bunnies
By Megan Driscoll
As I approached Rake Art Gallery this past May, I was confronted by a sea of gray bunnies, their eyes glowing red with single-minded purpose. The rabbits were clustered across a large, glossy block of wood with the word "fuck" scrawled over and over in delicate cursive in the background. Wild Fuck Crazed Bunnies, as it were.
"Wild Fuck Crazed Bunnies"
© Corey Smith
Mixed Media and Resin on Wood
Image Courtesy of the Artist
This painting and its twin, turned to face inside the gallery, sat displayed in the window of the Rake, beckoning visitors into the wryly humorous world of Corey Smith.
Smith, the self proclaimed "ever so hot trender bender," displayed the paintings at the Rake under the title Ultra Artsy. This flippant tone characterizes his work, which relies on a hip, deadpan humor to convey its message of pop culture saturation. And although many of the paintings hit like one-liners, others convey an eerie emptiness that leads the viewer deeper.
The large scale of Wild Fuck Crazed Bunnies is typical of his paintings, which are executed in a variety of media on large blocks of wood, all coated in a resin that gives them a high-gloss finish. Going back and forth between solid black line drawings and the grittier texture of photo transfer, Smith's images emerge starkly from neutral backgrounds, complemented occasionally by sparing use of solid color.
The paintings have a graphic quality that connects them with the Pop Art movement of the mid-twentieth century, as well as with the more recent integration of graphic illustration into the art world.
Walking around the gallery, the large, bold images tend to loom over the viewer, recalling the sense of cultural invasion that Smith quotes as the inspiration for his art. The paintings address the growing tendency of media imagery to move into our lives and alter our realities, pressing into the viewer's world with the same absorbing intensity as images on a screen.
Smith describes his paintings as emerging from a "Post Hope" world, where the deceptions of pop culture have paradoxically become more "real" than our own lives, creating a world where the conflict between the struggles of humanity and the fantasies of Hollywood renders American social values absurd.
Paris Hilton, the contemporary emblem of empty stardom and pop culture extravagance, is a recurring figure in Smith's work. Her sideways glance and golden girl smirk watch over the hopeless denizens of the gallery with a promise of the good life, the world of the rich and famous that is as glittering and elusive as the heavenly afterlife. A montage of small images of Hilton's face, photo-transferred onto the wood, reminds us that Everything's Nice When You're Covered in Ice.
"Everything's Nice When You're Covered in Ice"
© Corey Smith
Photo Transfer, Mixed Media, and Resin on Wood
Image Courtesy of the Artist
Smith's sense of humor grows darker with paintings like Enjoy Life, which depicts a woman nursing a baby while smoking a cigarette. He toys with notions of depravity, confronting the irony of modern sexual politics in Modern Woman, in which a woman clad only in stripper heels spreads her legs and parts her labia, her sex echoing the vibrant pink of her lips and nails.
And, lest the depravity ring too cliché, Smith pokes equal fun at virtue with Brace Boy's "free ticket to heaven."
Taking my leave of the Rake Gallery, I was faced once again with Wild Fuck Crazed Bunnies, this time realizing that they act as an appropriate metaphor for the modern masses, driven to pleasure, to excess, to the fantastically empty world of pop culture.
This is the existentialism of Smith's generation, and the reason why his artistic ephemera offers a camaraderie of sorts; with no anchoring source of meaning outside the hyperreal world of Hollywood icons and other media glitterati, we revert to the ironic celebration of emptiness.
