DEBRA STECKLER: ORDINARY PEOPLE / April 21-May 30, 2006

 

 
“Ordinary People” by Debra Steckler is an installed hanging of twelve acrylic portraits of people whose images have been taken from the mass media magazines of celebrity culture, and many of their faces will be familiar to visitors. They include Princess Diana, Marlon Brando, Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson, Margaret Thatcher, and the philosopher Adorno. But the also include a variety of visages whose attitude or bearing appealed to Steckler and came to signify an equal degree of specialness as those which we would find familar despite the crass context of their portrayal in the media. As the artist states about her work, “I am interested in how pop stars, icons in literature, music, and culture in general, are abundantly portrayed in magazines and newspapers, a sort of social leveler where pictures of the dead and living, famous and “washed-up” rest side by side. The images offer only so much information. The individual and cultural imagination fills in the rest. By painting these figures on decorator paint chips, the scale and social weight of these images is reduced; ultimately they are ordinary people.” [Partial statement by the Artist]