Tomorrow 2021: Ian Decker

I paint and collage landscapes that hold space for unearthing and unpacking the mundane and magical absurdities of the present. They are American landscapes and the land is bloated, torn, hand-me-down, funny/not funny, sentimental, and alive. These paintings search for the sublime in the paper cup, in the small thingness of the world. Cycles of decay and regeneration imbue the painting with a memory, a history, a surface, and an alchemy of accident to create an aura of the land’s persona and the communities that inhabit it. 

Collaging found objects, family photos, trash and art history, the layers of the painting become a proscenium of money, power, and human frailty. By placing fragments next to each other, a constellation of intimate moments grows, a web of broken and contradictory stories emerges, and a totality of the world is suggested, if not felt.