2013

Pandemic is my aerosol-painted homage to Grant Wood’s American Gothic, reimagined through the anxious theatre of contagion. Where the original holds its pose like a promise of order, this version lets the image slip into something stranger: familiar faces becoming symbols, domestic certainty turning porous, the farmhouse mood curdling into a warning.

I treated the stencil like a scalpel, carving the composition down to its essential geometry, then rebuilding it with spray paint and controlled bleed. The result is intentionally restrained, almost clinical in structure, but emotionally loud, like a siren behind a closed window. It’s not about gore. It’s about the dread of proximity, the way a community can feel both intimate and hazardous in the same breath.

The work was selected as a finalist for the Australian Stencil Art Prize 2013 and exhibited at Chrissie Cotter Gallery.

Details

105 × 80 cm

Aerosol spray on canvas, 2013

Press: Sydney Morning Herald