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Liam Coughlin
In my sculptural practice, I conjoin, embed, and conceal cheap plastic ephemera with and within common building materials as a means to craft a surreal allusion to the suburban rural New England landscape. The repeated use of chintz—Halloween pumpkin pails, plastic Walmart shopping bags, and Burger King cups—often makes reference to the depressing cultural psychosis of the ceaseless chain-store holiday display. My interest in frontality is both a physical reference to the kinds of façade-oriented, strip-mall architecture that often define these down-trodden spaces as well as a call-back to the repressed mentality of growing up in a homogenized, hermetically sealed, village-like culture of a small New England town. This frontality is just as much a formal concern as a metaphorical interest. The seemingly dichotomous relationships developed between the consumer byproducts and construction materials serve to develop a type of alphabet within the material focus of my studio practice. These constructed, pseudo-minimalist forms serve as containers for meaning as they oscillate between withholding and offering information through partially or completely obscured objects, sounds, and videos.