Love: American Style

Dana Robinson

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Love: American Style (2019) is a series of works using gouache paint, and collage, to address black female identity and black love. Each work is made from one full page advertisement depicting black love made perfect and captured in a moment through bonding over a product. I delicately cut up and surround the elements of the ad with doodles painted with gouache that are interpretations of existing art works and contrast with the glossy surface of the magazine paper.

The work highlights the banal complexity of daily life and romantic love and the lack of healthy examples presented to us in pop-culture. Using the relationship standard of the heterosexual couple of the same race, class bonding over consumerist goods, I immediately realize it’s inadequacy as a tool to measure much of modern love against but I also recognize an equally developed alternative is not currently present. As a result of frustration I literally dissect these images of love to try to make sense of it. I hold up fractured examples of the past to see if I can bring them into the present. I am left pushing around different images of home and G-rated intimacy in the throws of daily life that take the form of geometric shapes, ubiquitous objects and flashes of glossy ads divorced from their origins.

A selection shown at Gloria’s in 2019

Love: American Style #, 2019, Gouache, collage, 11 x 14 inches