Playing at Being American

This series of paintings explore my imagination of America. In the late 1970s my parents left South Africa, dodging military service to study at the University in Eugene Oregon . As a small child I paged through albums and slide decks filled with square pictures of this distant place. Growing up in 1980s South Africa during the last days of apartheid, the sunlit images of road trips, lakes and redwoods seemed to hold an untouched innocence missing from my own immediate reality. This series explores America as an imaginary Eden. This idyllic vision stands in contrast to past and present South African realities as well as to the realities of contemporary America.

These paintings are about simultaneity and a certain too-muchness: an excess of images. They discuss holding conflicting identities and imaginations together at once. Out of this excess, the literal layering of images, emerges a spatial and temporal discontinuity which describes instabilities around my own actual and imagined sense of identity.

I take the title of this series from a critical article by John Caughie in which he explores the “impudent objectification of an imaginary America” by viewers of American TV. This combination of ironic "insubordination” and fascination that he describes applies very well to my own take on the idea of America.

This project is still in process and I continue to add to this body of work.