About the Exhibition:
It’s Time To Start The Show is a solo exhibition featuring new works by Henry Swanson. The practice of Henry Swanson (b. 1993, Dallas, TX) draws on familiar figures from various media Golden Ages to examine American cultural norms and their slow descents into irrationality. Swanson’s work is not merely nostalgic, it traces a gradual loss of emotional innocence that ultimately gives way to something stoic and thoughtful – perhaps even cold.
Largely centered on portraiture, Swanson’s practice considers the space we occupy on social media as front-facing characters and uses singular characters as proxies to stand in for the viewer. Swanson has always found “stand-ins” for the self to be something overtly central in the history of portrait painting, particularly important now, when living in an ever-consuming media environment acting as a mediating presence.
Jim Henson’s creation of the Muppets as both saccharine and approachable – while also being slightly spicy and absurd – is very much in lockstep with the use of proxies. Henson voiced and shaped the minds of many characters, each spanning gender, species, and occupation. Each character Henson invented feels all at once relatable and uncanny: both a child and an adult. Swanson has culled numerous images over the years to encapsulate Henson’s atmosphere of the self as being local and affectionate, while also being a bizarre universe of the quirky and off-putting. Henson’s characters and Swanson’s paintings welcome the viewer into a world of being that is multifaceted, at times conflicted, and even a little senseless – the push and pull between innocence and the chaos of adulthood that we all fear.
In It’s Time To Start The Show, Swanson focuses on a world that was meant to be a warm hug, released into the culture in the early 70s with everything from Sesame Street to Fraggle Rock. While Henson himself was a fan of dark comic books and sci-fi, his choice to pivot between his many facets of universal charm and space-like angst resonates deeply through many of Swanson’s paintings.
This exhibition embraces the notion that we all, at times, can feel like both the artist and the entertainer. It’s time to put on makeup. It’s time to dress up right. It’s time to raise the curtain on the Muppet Show tonight.
