Logan Criley

As It Stands is pleased to present One Thousand American Nights, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based painter Logan Criley.

While American culture has always been a mosaic of imported elements, the internet and globalism have only amplified this pluralism. Logan Criley’s work seeks to elucidate this cultural fragmentation and to interrogate the construction of individual and collective identity . “One Thousand American Nights” aims to explore a unique cultural moment where the beauty and insidiousness of this condition are ever-present.

In “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” Ralph Ellison describes American culture as “a vortex of discordant ways of living and tastes, values, and traditions; a whirlpool of odds and ends in which the past courses in uneasy juxtaposition with those bright, futuristic principles and promises to which we, as a nation, are politically committed.” Criley’s paintings celebrate this milieu, capturing the beauty of that vision, juxtaposing disparate images from the American cultural landscape.

Criley is equally critical of the reduction of cultural symbols to mere tools for manufacturing and selling a sense of identity and meaning. Their repetition, over mediation, and commodification suggests a nefarious development which parallels a growing cultural pluralism. Criley’s paintings draw attention to the technologization and commodification of ‘culture’ and the robbery of its transcendent potential.

No place better embodies these complexities than the city of Los Angeles. Growing up in Los Angeles, Criley was steeped in the artifice of Hollywood, Disneyland, Tudor houses and ranchos in the suburbs, and plaster pagodas arranged without regard for history or context—an architectural incarnation of André Malraux’s “Museum Without Walls.” This is the America that Criley paints: a collage of appropriated symbols, a cacophony of manufactured identities and histories. Jean Baudrillard describes this environment succinctly: “America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth… Having seen no slow, centuries long accumulation of a principle of truth, it lives in perpetual simulation, in a perpetual present of signs.”

Criley’s work reflects American cultural identity in its richness and its artifice. In addition to the vortex of symbols and icons that constitute American popular culture, Criley also refers to classical, expressionist, surrealist, pop, and other art historical vernaculars. In a fractured nation, Criley is inspired by the aggregate of many voices vying for their particular visions. His paintings depict a culture whose form is as dynamic, beautiful, and dark as the imaginations that shape it.