Schroeder Romero is pleased to present Monkey Brains, new paintings by Laurie Hogin.

Best known for her allegorical paintings of mutant plants and animals in languishing, overgrown landscape settings or posed as though for classical still life or portraiture, Hogin’s current interests include examining human impulses, desires, and needs, including pleasure, intoxication, addiction, the erotic, totem, violence, greed, grief, and love. These aspects of human experience and identity, resultant of the interplay of evolutionary biology and culture, find expression in the history of visual culture as well as in the nearly schizoid array of cultural material and commodity in contemporary consumer capital. Hogin combines various tropes from the history of painting, natural history and scientific display, pornography, fashion photography and retail display with narrative allegory, often describing political, social, economic, and emotional phenomena.

“Monkey Brains” refers to the notion that human behavior is determined not by a disembodied rationality, as suggested in the history of many patriarchal narratives and philosophies, but rather by the fact that we are the sum total of our genetics and our experience, and that the neurobiological, which is determined by these conditions, in turn determines our behavior and the social conditions that result; we are rational only as determined by our desires; we are desirous as determined by our psychology in the largest sense. Works such as “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” combines visual strategies from the history of allegorical painting and narrative natural history dioramas with conventions of retail window and store shelf display. Species are chosen for their allegorical associations in Western culture, but are depicted as degraded or mutant versions: They are the Day-Glo colors of contemporary media landscapes; their morphology resembles toys and cartoons as much as naturalistic specimens. The ground is littered with Rozerem tablets (Rozerem is a newly marketed sleep medication sometimes associated with severe side effects including bizarre, violent, disturbing and vivid dreams, depression and hallucinations)—a reference to medical science, one of the great triumphs of modernity, turned dangerous as it serves the profit motives of the pharmaceutical industry by appealing to the American taste for a quick fixes. “What Ails Us: The 100 Most Commonly Prescribed Pharmaceuticals” is a Modernist-inspired grid of 100 tiny guinea pig paintings. Each pill-shaped creature sports the drug’s brand colors, used to identify the pills or to market them to consumers and physicians. It is notable that the vast majority of these drugs are used to treat problems commonly associated with the excesses of American culture and political conditions: obesity, type II diabetes, depression, heart disease, insomnia, erectile dysfunction. The allegory suggests that our desires make us the guinea pigs in late capital’s experiment.

Laurie Hogin’s work is included in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts and the Federal Reserve Bank, Detroit, among other public collections. She recently had a solo exhibition, “Looking Back to the Forest of the Future”, at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art as well as “Laurie Hogin: Selected Works” at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA.