Michael Fullerton

Michael Fullerton’s latest exhibition describes a network of corporate and state power—which the artist associates with statements of aesthetic formalism—by presenting oil portraits interspersed with wall texts, lasers, and large-scale screen prints. The show departs from a picture of MGM founder Samuel Goldwyn and his famous lion emblem—its credo Ars gratia artis (Art for art’s sake) appears in a nearby wall text. Subjects range from Cary Grant, who is depicted on acid with the CBS logo floating nearby, to Gordon Jarvie, an ex member of the British Special Forces as well as founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, who is juxtaposed with two headshots of 1930s MGM leading lady Jean Harlow. The portraits are rendered in a style that the artist notes was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough, whose paintings promoted secular Enlightenment ideals.

Elsewhere are two light installations: Two Stars, Two Magnitudes (Polaris Due North. The traversal of Regulus, Due East Between 2001 hrs and 0302 hrs), 2013, includes lasers that simulate Polaris—as a point—and the traversal of Regulus—as a line—on the walls of the gallery and a cube of flashing police strobes on the floor titled Working Maquette for a Sculpture Entitled Formalism – Sucking Corporate Cock Since 1968, 2013. By conflating stars (those in the media with those of the sky), and by associating formalism with state and corporate control, Fullerton responds to MGM’s motto and celebrity machine. Coupled with the portraits, all which are accompanied by extensive if shallow biographical wall texts, these works also elucidate the artist’s embrace of heterogeneous images and mediums. “Meaning Inc.” channels Gainsborough’s Enlightenment individual through corporatization and media spectacle—whether an anachronic painting style can illuminate without reinscribing these subjugating systems seems Fullerton’s gambit.