Suran Song, 2020 Economic Decline for Election Day Gesso, paint, cardboard box, sundry shipping materials 54 x 54 inches

The Rustbelt is most often thought to include New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Great Lakes Canada. These works capture my experience of life during the decades following the decline of industry, from the late-1970’s through The Regan Era when Regan declared a packet of ketchup was nutritionally equal to a serving of green vegetables in his austerity budgeting for government subsidized children’s school lunches.

These works utilize post-consumer products with mixed media in order to raise questions about the range of my lived experience as a child of that era of American austerity, from the political and visionary, to the destructive and apocalyptic. They interrogate the consequences of heavy industry decline, the disappearance of main street and subsequent rise of hyper consumerism and gentrification, general life — artistic, social, work, family, otherwise, and the state of being caught between changes with juxtapositions of old and new.

“Economic Downturn (detritus bas reliefs and metal photographs)”

Suran Song, 2020 Economic Decline for Christmas Gesso, paint, cardboard box, sundry shipping materials 60 x 72 inches

Suran Song, 2020 Economic Decline for Independence Day Gesso, paint, cardboard box, sundry shipping materials 48 x 36 inches

Suran Song, 2020 Economic Decline for Soul Charter Gesso, paint, cardboard box, sundry shipping materials 72 x 36 inches. Installation sculpture cum video screen composed with rescued shipping materials, landscape detritus, and Platons Ungeschriebene Lehre, Konrad Gaiser’s famous philosophical charts of the Platonic concept of soul.

Suran Song, 2020 Economic Decline for Soul Charter (detail on detritus back-screen for Platonic projections). Gesso, paint, cardboard box, sundry shipping materials

Suran Song, 2020 Economic Decline for Soul Charter (with Platonic projection art) Gesso, paint, cardboard box, sundry shipping materials

Suran Song, 2020 Cedar Point Kneeling (left panel of diptych) Metal print on aluminum sheet 12 x 8 inches

Suran Song, 2020 Cedar Point Detritus (right panel of diptych) Metal print on aluminum sheet 12 x 8 inches