Anna Schachte presents a string of distinctly American landscapes, from majestic national parks to austere strip malls. These sites are acted upon physically with bodies and paint, at the intersection of commercial, cultural, critical and lyrical dichotomies. I take the view that, as a contemporary artist who paints, I have a tourist’s eye. The tourist-painter, full of postmodern romanticism for the past and a desire to visit important historic sites, collects souvenirs in the hopes of making something new. As a starting point for creating a new body of work I went on an imagined Great American Road Trip. Since my previous work has been largely concerned with comparing the past and the present of painting and popular history, I decided it was time to approach the future. In all earnestness, these two admittedly goofy images, the road and the future, allowed me to imagine a story of painting’s future and to include myself in it. The Future Is Here, a group of new paintings of American places, exudes tourism, patriotism, skepticism, and optimism for the road ahead.

These paintings are about acts of looking and making pictures. They are filled with spectators, voyeurs and various picture-makers. Cartooning and architectural rendering are fused with drips, brushstrokes, and pools of paint to construct surreally familiar landscape. The illustrative passages suggest a story, but most often a painting event completes the narrative equation and becomes the object of the tourist’s gaze. —Anna Schachte