ALTERNATIVE MUSEUM
Jerry Kearns paints America's "Great Melting Pot" as a cultural crucible where high and low imagery simmer and intermingle but don't fully dissolve. We recognize familiar icons from 18th-century American portraiture and 19th century landscape, each digitized via computer and imposed onto large canvases. Kearns then partially covers these alluring, rather pointillist-looking layers with flat, boldly painted details culled from comic books.
The results are sometimes droll. In Inherent Power, Gilbert Stuart's venerated rendition of President Washington is down-sized and cradled in the arms of the ideal mom, circa 1950. More often, though, things bend sinister. Romantic representations of America's unspoiled glories become backdrops for stark scenes of women wielding knives, laborers struggling with drums of toxic waste, and gun-toting guys wearing turbans. Occasionally elements are inverted or reversed in looking-glass fashion. Clearly things are not what they once were in our New Eden, and Kearns questions if they ever were.
The uneasy truce between these disparate worlds is maintained by the artist's deft sense of composition and his wily juxtapositions of unlikely components. In the work Irresistible Impulse, for instance, a tropical orchid that blossoms behind one woman's worried eyes bears an uncanny resemblance to an X ray of her skull.
Kearns's newest works are entirely hand-painted portraits of tarnished newsmakers and their admirers. O. J. Simpson, Joey Buttafuoco, David Koresh, and Michael Jackson stand in front of billboard-size settings that include everything from Disneyland to Diirer's Apocalypse. Portraiture, which once elevated historical personages to the status of legends, now records 15 seconds of infamy.
--GERARD HAGGERTYARTnews October 1996