Rebecca Morris
Piper
But does she want us to get hungry or nauseous? I think she wants us to get nostalgic. In all likelihood she grew up eating this stuff, preferred Quarter Pounders to her mother’s cooking, and maybe even celebrated a few birthdays in the McCheese party room. She got older, however, went to art school, experimented with vegetarianism, and read Noam Chomsky. She started to regard fast food served in brown, orange, and yellow packaging and buildings as cruel, corporate, and cholesterol laden. Then, as time went by, maybe she lightened up a little. Maybe she allowed herself an Extra Value Meal one evening and found she loved it. She goes back every now and then when she needs something to lift her spirits, but she doesn’t make a habit of it. The paintings represent her effort to assimilate this experience into her art.
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An ongoing series of exploded and unexploded caps–lined up in rows or set out in snippets and sandwiched between the glass of old frames–Anxious Moments hangs on two adjoining walls of the gallery, off in a corner. The installation derives its poignancy partly from a sense of sheer futility: the thrill of caps is supposed to come and go in the instant they’re detonated. As soon as the echoes of their tiny explosions die down and the scent of the gunpowder fades, the paper can be disposed of. Instead, Piper preserves the useless and dumb mementos with the sanctity that should be reserved for portraits of her grandparents’ grandparents. Even though she knows it’s hopeless, she tries to prolong the childhood thrill, and by association childhood itself.
