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Lunch: a Psychic Landscape skewers consumer culture at Jackson Fine Art



Sheila Swift’s photographs are advertisements for America’s toxicity.

Swift adopts Madison Avenue’s visual conventions of subjugating everything to the product by spotlighting a package of hair dye or a can of Lysol against a spotless, empty, white background. By removing all inducements to buy, Swift presents these products like Adam minus the fig leaf, in all their unadorned, naked shame. That nakedness is part of Swift’s mission: to show the absurdity of these products, like Slim-Fast bars, which come in the pig-out flavor of cookie dough. And a can of FDS, which promises to bestow the alluring scent of “white blossoms,” as if the garden at Versailles could bloom in one’s crotch.

These images — of shower gel and bottled water and face cream — highlight a strange circumstance. Though consumer sophistication and jadedness would seem to have increased tenfold since the consumerpalooza of the ’50s, these advertisers still shill a classic repertoire of flowery, lemony scents and continue to play an unchanging tune on our cultural hit parade.

In previous centuries, people worried about death. Today’s deepest, darkest fear? Smelling weird.

Beneath these whitewashed voids is ickiness aplenty. The stark cleanliness of Swift’s images only serves to indicate bathroom funkiness, pet odors, musky genitals, sloppy, cellulite-pocked obesity, wrinkles and filthy diapers. This is a gender- and class-blind neurosis, too. One of Swift’s photos is of a nefarious product called “Man Delay,” a “benzocaine male genital desensitizer” that summons up all manner of unpleasant bedroom tragedies featuring shame, failure and the gooey weapons of sexual battle stashed away in bedside tables.

Swift also references products from a spectrum of American consumer demographics, from the more upscale tongue-in-cheek shill of a jar of Philosophy face cream facetiously billed as “Hope in a Jar,” to the more prosaic belief that even something as caustic and nasally assaultive as bleach can be prettied up with the scent of flowers. By placing them side by side, Swift performs an equalizing effect, so that the means to selling FDS is as transparent and base as the more sophisticated effort to sell a yuppie shower gel as spiritual hygiene. Swift has a discerning eye for the freakier aspects of consumer products, which are rarely examined closely.

Along with these 14 photographs, Swift has piped in a soundscape of domestic chaos: the sound of a piercing ringing phone, breaking glass, gun fire, a violently scrubbed surface, a baby’s shrieks. And on a table in the center of the room is a collection of white “menus” on which elegant script describes the maladies of American consumer culture. One contains a list of chemicals found in food, another bears a description undoubtedly taken from a plastic surgeon’s pamphlet of what recovering patients can expect. On one menu, Swift lists a host of unpleasant symptoms of depression. On another are the absurdly adventurous names — Pathfinder, Expedition — for SUVs that will never leave a paved road.

It would be hard to miss any of the critique Swift has offered here. The bland plenitude of an American life, where every stain and stink is addressed and dealt with, has created an ancillary culture of new problems: horrific self-image and the depression that results when life has lost its authenticity and been reduced to death’s scrubbed waiting room reeking of chemically engineered “fresh wildflowers.”

In case anyone has any doubts as to where this valley of dysfunction is located, Swift has stretched the elongated, undulating red and white stripes of the American flag above this consumer frenzy.

Lunch: A Psychic Landscape, as Swift calls this installation, can so often reward a reflex cynicism about the vapidity of consumer culture, it is tempting to delve beneath the surface and imagine a more personal inspiration for this cultural revulsion. There are few occasions when the sickness of a world founded on chemicals, enormous gas-guzzling SUVs, preservatives and antibacterial paranoia is more overwhelming and life-or-death dramatic than when you anticipate bringing a child into that foul mire — as a pregnant Swift soon will do.

Swift has included an image in Lunch of a grotesquely contorted baby doll whose face is pursed in an expression of soured disgust and trauma. That disturbed baby is not a product but a potential receptacle for these sprays and foods and creams, and it seems to embody the artist’s revulsion at facing this chemical haze. Neither doll nor human, this Landfill Kiddie suggests Inez van Lamsweerde’s similarly creepy children wearing leering adult smiles or Kim Dingle’s demonic rugrats.

That visceral, troubling response to these neat, clean, seemingly harmless products is what gives the work a depth to counter its more obvious strains. Like Mary Shelley’s maternal anxiety gothic, Frankenstein, Swift’s installation has envisioned a monster baby, and it is that grotesque creation that hints at a distress much deeper than consumer critique.

Lunch: A Psychic Landscape runs through June 29 at Jackson Fine Art, 3115 E. Shadowlawn Ave. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. 404-233-3739.??