Collage Works
Sculptural Works
Elsie the Cow is a cartoon character created in 1936 for advertising the dairy products of the Borden Dairy Company. Borden added her husband Elmer the Bull in 1940 and their two offspring Beulah and Beauregard in 1948. All of the images of Elsie’s family that I have used in my artwork are original graphics cut from magazines published in the 1950’s. These advertisements depicted a cartoon version of a middle class suburban American family, either directly or indirectly enjoying the dairy products of the company, oblivious to any problems beyond trivial domestic family dramas. I have rearranged the position and apparent gestures of the characters from these humorously innocent advertisements to create a critical commentary on the manifold problems affecting American life and politics in the 21st century.
In the three dimensional pieces the characters seemingly are manipulated by partially hidden machinery controlled by sinister forces. In those pieces combining imagery of processed foods, these bovine characters seem oblivious to the inevitability that the corporate machine that feeds them will enslave them for their milk and inevitably grind them up for food and other products such as the famous Elmer’s glue. In the two- dimensional collages the activating “machinery” that controls the characters is derived from the shapes and movement inherent in giant images of orchids cut from 1950’s magazines.