Kathy Weldon’s work is like a house of mirrors at a carnival. Yet rather than stretching and twisting the human patrons who have strayed into a labyrinthine arcade, Weldon’s work plunges into American culture itself, reflecting images that amplify, distort, and invert the inherently accepted dynamics of our society and its rituals. His paintings depict beautiful women wearing headdresses adorned with bullets and cigarettes; gigantic humans dwarfing industrial environments, appearing as toy-like miniatures; and, most famously, a four-eyed cat that both attracts and repels, with a magical eye strain that reflects both the euphoria and the withdrawal of meme-obsessed internet fans.
An artist just entering his thirties, Weldon grew up in Southern California and trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and his body of work is as diverse as it is almost endless, ranging from homages to ’80s pop culture to portraits of beautiful, saucer-eyed women who reveal their secret transgressive glow. However, a common thread between many of his paintings is an impulse to make playful caricatures or outright critical reproductions of realities we might accept at face value. But it turns out that acerbic edge isn’t always there. Nostalgia is one of the most influential forces behind Weldon’s work. “Nostalgia is an indescribable feeling,” Weldon explains. “I get that feeling when I see something I haven’t thought about in a long time, and it makes me feel happy and sad at the same time. I’ve always been obsessed with trying to explain and express that feeling.” In “AT-AT the There are more overt expressions of nostalgia in works such as “Playground” and “Ross’s Revenge,” which feature, respectively, Star Wars iconography and the painterly joy of television host Bob Ross (whose cultural presence largely hinged on his on-air nostalgia and his ability to lull a manic eight-year-old into longing for simpler times). But as Weldon himself attests, “it has become quite difficult to refer to something that is not already remembered in other media.” Nostalgia, especially of the explicit, accessible variety, is a cultural commodity, and as such it is as oversaturated as all other cultural commodities in highly commercialized, internet-ready America.
Nostalgia is a hard feeling to describe…I’ve always been obsessed with trying to explain and express it. “
Fortunately for Weldon, much of his work goes far beyond memes and visual puns, evoking in viewers a desperate longing that is more unconscious and subtle than the collective memory of violent cultural phenomena. Consider “lazy daze.” Wearing cherry embossed tank tops and denim shorts, the twins sat cross-legged and held a tiny Lazy Daze RV. Their giant figures dominate the composition, but the faded magenta forest, languid and narcotic in the pink haze of trees and fog, seems to dominate them. In Weldon’s hands, the RV is a precious totem that represents a technology-free world of Acadian road trips, camping, and nature exploration. These beautiful and sad girls are both objects of nostalgia and mourners, holding the RV like a beloved souvenir of an irrevocable time and lifestyle. Works like “Suburban Terror” and “Coney Island” take a similar tack, reminding us that nostalgia is strongest when it’s an elusive, attenuated feeling that recalls a feeling we once had.
