blackbird spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

GALLERY

ADAPTATION SYNDROME  |  Painting in Contemporary Image Culture

Rosemary Fiore

 Good-Time Mix Machine: Scrambler Drawing (detail), 2004
 Visual Arts Center of Richmond
 Courtesy Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery, Chicago, and ADA Gallery, Richmond

Reclaiming an increasingly mechanized visual language for painting, Rosemarie Fiore uses machines like carnival rides, lawn mowers, and windshield wipers to literally make the marks in her paintings. Animating the “hand” of technology, her Scrambler Drawing is a kind of mechanized “action painting” that bears the gesture of the machine. A consideration of Fiore’s concept, process, and underlying critique of popular culture deepens the “offhand” beauty of the monumental Spirograph-like patterns produced by the spinning amusement-park ride.