The animals in Laurie Hogin’s new show (opening tonight at Peter Miller) look the viewer in the eye partly because of one of her childhood preoccupations. “One of my favorite questions,” she says, “was ‘What’s it like to be you?’ People would answer, ‘It’s all right, I guess,’ and I would be frustrated. I meant it literally: what is it like to look at the world from behind your eyeballs? In my paintings, animals look at the viewer–the eye contact implies the relationship of one consciousness to another.”
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Hogin says she learned to look animals in the eye while roaming the woods adjoining her childhood home in Cos Cob, Connecticut. “I noticed the way the behavior of animals and the growth of fungus would indicate the seasons,” she says. “I learned to identify different plants and animals.” She collected specimens of various kinds and sketched them. She was also fascinated by the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History: “They took me to the idea of stopping time in nature, of cheating death.” When she saw people illegally dumping everything from household garbage to industrial refuse, she says, “it would really piss me off–don’t fuck with my woods. It gave me this sense of them as vulnerable and invaded.” By high school she was an environmental activist.
In 1995 Hogin began painting monkeys, aware that they’ve historically been symbols of lust and imitation. “You put the two together,” she says, “and you have the brand-loyal consumer.” One painting at Peter Miller shows a monkey holding a toothbrush, its red-and-white fur replicating the colors of Colgate packaging. In another, the colors of the sleeping pill Ambien are echoed in a white monkey tipped with red. The show includes 15 monkey paintings from a series called “Allegory of Psychodemographics: 24 Branded Products My Family Uses on a Typical Summer Day.” Another series on view consists of 36 small paintings of reptiles crawling over construction sites, inspired by the McMansions being built outside Urbana-Champaign, where Hogin is chair of painting and sculpture at the University of Illinois. “These monsters are metaphors,” she says, “for the results of converting grade-A farmland to subdivisions.” Her apocalyptic The Last Place on Earth shows a Noah’s Ark-like array of creatures in what she calls the “colors of store shelves.” These animals look like mutants–and Hogin remarks that “some frogs today have Prozac in their systems, and pastoral midwestern farming is really all about serving the fast-food industry.” Of her own creations she says, “The colors of industry and advertising are in the very flesh of these creatures.” They also respresent parts of her own psyche, “including the hardwired desires that could be characterized as ‘reptilian’–scary and potentially destructive.
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