Andrew Cramer: Happiness… @ MILK Gallery

Happiness…is a warm gun. We are consumers of death. The media’s images of death and war are sensational and often disturbingly glamorized. As Susan Sontag writes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, our current culture experiences life’s terrors through references seen on television or within the pages of printed publications. Our emotional responses to this imagery skew what we witness firsthand. In this series, Andrew Cramer gives context to our culture of violence. Objects of death become glossy and highly desirable products with his paintings of guns and skulls. Like the artistic traditions of artists Jacques-Lois David’s paintings that narrated a heroic French Revolution, Cramer glorifies its weapons and carnage. Yet, within Cramer’s works, there are no warriors and no historical context. Stripping landscapes and human subjects from the canvas all that remains within the frame are fetishized weapons and skeletal frames. Fusing classic oil painting techniques with modern technology, Cramer terms his paintings as “photo abstracts”�. Relaying digitally transformed objects onto canvases with oil and enamel complete the "photo abstract" process. The guns exemplify devices of bloodshed. The glass skulls materialized for Cramer like the romantic narrations of Virginia Wolf: “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”� Cramer envisions every detail of his surroundings with clinical precision. It is almost as if there is no concern with the actual object of vision, rather the perception. The glass skulls are the act of looking as perspectives change and the viewer shifts positional engagement. Cramer refers to these abreactions as “new wave drawings”�. By feeding the drawings into the computer for enhancement, the skulls take orbit. He utilizes technology and the resulting skulls are DuraClear on tempered glass. Cramer’s Happiness… examines the process behind the idolization of violence. Cramer attended the Savannah College of Art and Design from 1994- 1998 and moved to New York City later in 1998. His first solo exhibition was at Milk Gallery in September 2004. He currently lives NYC with a studio in Brooklyn.