Erin Finley

Jayne Mansfield's Dog

February 15 - 28, 2009
Reception Thursday February 19, 7-10pm

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Jayne Mansfield’s Dog is about an alternative universe where themes of youth, beauty, and death are explored with generous melodrama and artificiality. Wistful starlets, brawny heroes, and pretty androgynes feature prominently in this bizarre locus where the boundary between truth and fiction is blurred. With a palette inspired by jelly beans, lemonade, and bruised flesh, these artworks are, by turns, sweet, humorous, melancholic, nostalgic, and naive.

For their hyperbolic emotionality, my drawings and paintings allude to catalogues of the lowbrow: there are allusions to vampires, Batman, Mexican lucha libre wrestling masks, Fifties rock ‘n’ roll films, and publicity stills from Kenneth Anger’s gossipy “Hollywood Babylon”. But the project is also born of a post-9/11 aesthetic current regarding art and tragedy. In this era of lost innocence, art has the power to grant romance and grandeur to sad events, making them poetic and, to quote Cindy Sherman, “easier to absorb”.

In 1966, Jayne Mansfield’s car-crash death also claimed the life of her little dog, a gruesome cult photograph of the dog’s limp body was taken by reporters.


- Erin Finley