Pam Butler
Channel: ARTZINES.INFO
Date: 2018-10-18

From Pam Butler's personal website:

"My work is an experiential trip through the images of the everyday – the politician of the moment, the latest bad businessman, beauty pageants, wars, and plastic Santa Clauses. These images delineate, below our conscious awareness, the outlines of our social codes, morals and societal values. This is us, our now, our Miss America, our dead soldier, our corrupt leaders, our plastic trinkets. This is our businessman, our hero of rapacious capitalism, our astronaut, our white knight in white armor, blowing in from his moon to do battle with our made up enemies in distant lands. And always, and everywhere, that big smile, that everywhere repeating and repeating smile of the salesperson, the news anchor, the game show host, the latest hot product spokesperson, and that ever-present smile of Miss America and the latest lottery winner.

I am re-presenting the culture back to itself through it’s mythologies as represented in the banal and the brutal. My intention is to show these images as tools used to perpetuate our cultural values and our social structure. I paint and draw them with a direct cartoonist line and a loose skewed realism, stretching a smile, smearing a face or turning the moon a blood red. I take photographs and videos as a participant in the scene – through the car window while driving, from the audience at beauty pageants. I make use of found images and stickers. I use nail polish, lipstick and eye liner. The images are played with in these different mediums in an effort to get to find how they are showing us our personal contradictions and the societal undercurrents that form the basis of who we actually are."