Wayne Coe

Statement 

  The first images I painted were somewhere between history paintings of contemporary events and cinematic fantasy, a genre I was immersed in from commercial work. 9/11 Aural accounts, truths I read about for which there were no images became my subjects. Framing very sensitive war imagery in a fictive movie context, dramatizing brutal truths using movie star surrogates, seemed a negotiated settlement. A lenticular of an office space, ascending graphs, and happy coworkers turns into a plane tearing through the office, Gotterdammerung,  then all's peaceful again, a productive company office. Change without change. Terror without consequences. The war on terror is a show, fictive, unreal, consumer product for US citizens to pass the time.

  We live in an age without acknowledged financial or social costs. Even the most minor resistance results in firing, banning, de-platforming, branding one a traitor, “Putin-loving”. I feel war inflation destroying my income, but the government borrows for war MORE rapidly. Like the absence in Western Media, the absence of war costs is the most REAL content of Media. My work tends to always lead back to media, either its promise or treachery.

  Point of Purchase forms, POP, are designed to communicate institutional safety messages but can be reengineered to deliver truths about corporate corruption and failure to keep us safe. As a notional artist, my journalistic research and interdisciplinary work seek to deliver cognitive dissonance — forbidden in Western media. I’m interested in the media bubble as form & political filter where absences, like the absence of Jim Crow & vastly underrepresented female leads in Golden Era cinema, become the content, the “dominant narrative’. The highest flattery lavished on violent rich white men.

  Marketing forms are reality-altering forms. What is real when everything we know is delivered by state-controlled media?  When “progressives” are pro-war, and cultural inclusion is being outlawed we’re in a totalitarian moment. My art reflects my awareness of control. Brand PR is today's News. Advertising commodifies the horrific and humdrum for passive consumption, the Marvel Universe. The Iraq war instant Classic! 

  The methodology of instant NFT masterpieces is my consideration. The graphic design of denial & false narratives. The “true story” in my works is applied not to huckstering plastic toys or spectacles but to communicating existential truths media suppresses, the Howard Zinn universe, the POV where guard dogs have more rights than humans in cages. Capitalist packaging eradicates most content.

  To 99.9% of the world, 9/11 was a hit TV movie with endless sequels. Yet, like at the turn of the 20th century film when audiences run in fear from the screen the State produces “fear” and “paralysis”, “distraction” and “censorship” to guide us toward inaction.

  My FOREVER stamps show the “political rot at the center of the parties” (Gabbard) as zombies, bipartisan Dorian Gray portraits of spiritual corruption. Vote for the lesser of two evils makes me say, “I don’t want to vote for evil.”