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Colleen Critcher

Colleen Critcher is a visual artist fascinated by commodity culture, kitsch, and plastic things. Her works obsessively explore images of garden gnomes and dinosaur figurines, as she investigates the powerful significance of seemingly menial objects.

Critcher often projects herself as a character in a bizarre narrative of consumerism.

Critcher received her MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2012. She currently lives in South Carolina where she maintains a studio. She has taught art foundations courses at Coker University, Coastal Carolina University, and Francis Marion University. She serves as the gallery coordinator for University Place Gallery.

Her work has been shown at The Southern, Redux Contemporary Art Center, Kai Lin Art, Gutstein Gallery, and 701 Center for Contemporary Art.

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Consumed is a series born from my obsessions with American consumer culture, plastic dinosaurs, and kitsch. The series includes oil paintings on panel, small bookplate sized gouaches on paper, gilded sculptures, and an installation/performance piece. Narratives are constructed by positioning human figures with consumable objects in what are often disconcerting interactions. Symbolism plays a significant role in imagery pairings, which so far have included garden gnomes, unicorns, pomegranates, and tyrannosaurus rex figurines. Excessive multiples and stark blank backgrounds are meant to emulate contemporary shopping experiences.

T.Rex began appearing in my work as a reference to my own childhood initiation into a tradition of excess. They have subsequently evolved into functional symbols of consumerism itself. I am deeply appreciative of the irony of an enormous, extinct apex predator being recreated as small plastic icons for mass consumption; further dissolved of meaning by a ravenous popular culture.

American consumerism consistently asks us to find emotional value in objects. The result is a society largely inept at social interaction, instead more comfortable finding relationships with its own belongings. These artworks explore the relationships we have with consumed objects, the value we place on such things, as well as the system that perpetuates the hunger for more.

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