In Sioux City, Disparate Visions of the American West Converge
In "Pasture to Present" at Sioux City Art Center, Grant Wood’s Regionalism comes face to face with the challenging landscape of contemporary rural America.
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Samantha Joy Groff’s penchant for headlight yellow hues, representing sickness from the inside in Fentanyl Jesus, and from the outside in Late Harvest, further engage with the exhibition’s centerpiece, Wood’s Corn Room murals, hazy in a golden light that evoke the ebb and flow of dust and abundance and how the land endures in between. The murals have their own pride of place separate from contemporary comparisons, immersing viewers in both an environment similar to how they were first displayed in the dining room of the former Martin Hotel in Sioux City, while at the same time evoking the calm of Claude Monet’s Waterlilies or the Rothko chapel.
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Morgan’s work regularly tackles the anxiety of the rural woman coping with being seen, and what it feels like to receive the attention you demand, in pursuit of a successful modern life and part of popular culture. Her paintings long explored class issues with dark humor and satire, and her latest show tackles influencer tradwives who profit off performative provincialism, and buries the airs of the first family who for all their big city posturing, global influence and an equally extensive real estate empire, can’t help but engage with their surroundings like the Beverly Hillbillies of the oligarchy.