This exhibition showcases a video piece and a collection of paintings that combine airbrush, hand painted realism and expressive mark making. Krankie is both the title of the show and the video piece specifically, being it is the conceptual driver for the body of work.
Our approach for the video piece was to “make a movie” in a very amateur filmmaking sense. Playing on the relatable home video, shaky camera aesthetic while taking turns operating behind the scenes and as the actors. With lighting manipulation and voyeuristic pov, we follow two characters that live in the same small town neighborhood in 1989. A turbulent year in history, yet a seemingly mundane existence.
The two characters are unacquainted neighbors, but they share a fanatic obsession with a hyper famous actor of their time. The compositions for the paintings were derived from the idea of treating them as movie posters for the films in which the fictional “actor” celebrity starred. In this meta world of movies within a movie, there is a classic romance, a mysterious sci-fi, a surreal action movie, and an absurdist comedy.
Upon inception of this concept, we allowed our subconscious to form nonsensical scenes that once executed, spawned a fragmented mood driven story. Through semi-improvised shooting, we began seeing themes of anxiety and the manifestation of childlike characteristics in adults. Obsession with fame, indulgence in guilty pleasures and the eerie feeling of something’s wrong also came to the surface.
We drew inspiration for the title from a coffee shop we used to frequent in our teenage years called Krankies in Winston Salem, NC. Located next to the train tracks, Krankies was a place where you could sit for hours and observe the counter culture characters that frequented. Smells of burnt beans roasting, sounds of alt music playing and views of crusty southern punk kids smoking cigarettes… We sat with our moleskine notebooks out.
Krankie is an exploration of how video art and painting can interact through visual cues. Drawing inspiration from growing up in the south and touching on our fascination with neighborhood “characters”, we landed in the 80s… with bad tattoos, down and out, anxiously awaiting life’s next simple pleasure.
