Lisa Sanditz

Gallery Affiliations: CRG Gallery, ACME, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen

Region: Northeast


For the last ten years, I have been making paintings of the ways the marketplace and the wilderness intersect, overlap, and inform each other. Painting sports events, shopping malls, residential development and tourist destinations, I have tried, through complex, clashing and historically anchored painting techniques, to describe the brash, metastasizing flux of the American landscape.

In the winter of 2006-2007, I traveled to single-industry towns in China: Shoe City, Pearl City, Oil Painting Village and the like, burgeoning micro-economies dedicated to producing fantastic amounts of a single commercial product for export. I wanted to go to the source, to see where our goods originate and to understand the impact of their production on the topography of China. The landscape in these cities is furiously shifting from the pastoral to the industrial. In every direction, you see newly developed highways, high-rise housing complexes, billboards, migration patterns and environmental degradation. As factories assault these ancient landscapes, malls blossom in every town and city, glowing through the smoggy gloom.

The paintings I have executed of these places, adopt a critical position that questions the shared economic, cultural and environmental impact of China's production and foreign consumption.