Exhibition: March 28-April 5, 2025
Reception: Friday, April 4, 2025 @ 4:30pm at the Carlos Gallery
Sewanee Art Major Katie Knight's Senior Honors Exhibition explores consumer culture and its effects in today’s world through acrylic paint, ink, charcoal, and oil pastel.
Through the use of found source material, layered imagery, and tactile handling of materials, Overlooked: Art of Excess inspects and shines a light on the mindless behaviors of today’s consumer and mass media cultures. In past artistic movements, specifically Pop Art of the 1960s, artists glorified the mundane in their art in response to the new phenomenon of commercialization through the use of bright colors and hard lines. Today, Knight depicts discarded products and overabundant advertising in a tactile and crude way to draw attention to the negative habits that have developed since the beginning of the consumer age.
The works of Overlooked: Art of Excess use bold images and vibrant colors to depict trivial objects, such as trash, in a way that is overstimulating and powerful. This way of representation replicates the feeling of overwhelming advertising and consumerism that is experienced today. However, the paintings are realized in a tactile way that clearly shows the artistic process and materials of the work itself. By showing the work as carefully handmade through the inclusion of drips and exposed canvas, the menial images are deemed as “art”, thereby elevating them to objects worthy of examination. As the eye slows down and looks at the disordered painted surface, the question of the value and lack thereof that consumers place on these items becomes important to consider. By bringing the overlooked to attention through artistic glorification, this work acts as a mirror to reflect on one's own habits as they move through today’s consumer age.
