Sandra Low
Breaking News Artist's Statement

Pop-plop. Fizz-fizz.

Grubbing into the creamy center of revitalizing, spring fresh, fat-free, dishwasher safe, only one click away, up to the minute reports, we are left to pursue the froth of desire dispensed from corporate wet dream machines. My art wallows in surface, attempting to critically examine the perpetually deferred promise of consumer bliss that feeds us and creates us, without drowning in its glossy haze.

My current series of paintings deal with Los Angeles' sideshow siren songs of violence and videotape featured on the nightly television news. In a mutually masturbatory relationship, the news congratulates itself for performing a public service and the viewer is titillated by fear and the spectacle of death and victimization. The litany of crimes and car chases is mediated by a herd of newscasters, comforting in their erotic superficiality and homogenous hairstyles. Pinocchio depicted in Terror in the Southland re-presents a myth. Against a police lineup, the puppet in a ski mask becomes a blackfaced media lie; a distorted representation used to capitalize on fear and desire. Top Story insists that we look at who owns the flow of information. The recent flurry of corporate media mergers signals an alarming concentration of control over mass communications into a handful of companies. As a result, television news, as purveyors of the critical events of the day, seems to find the merging "synergy" of shootings and stranded kittens infinitely advantageous. The news seems to connect viewers to a "truer" reality than the one they experience on their couches, but in many ways, it actually distances us from experience.

Life on the screen becomes a paradoxical thing existing on its own. As we flip through the channels knowing however deceptive the news may be, its muse is grounded by the bleeding of flesh. The translation of the news' instantly obsolete and numbingly familiar video narratives into a freeze-frame of paint infuses the absurdly distorted with the pathos of the human hand, and canvas slips into a space where flesh and technology meet.