Yvette Mayorga’s Bubblegum-Pink Lament of the American Dream
about 3 months ago (02/07/2024)
Yvette Mayorga’s Bubblegum-Pink Lament of the American Dream Skip to content Yvette Mayorga, “F* is for ICE 1975-2018 (After Portrait of Innocent X, c. 1650, Diego Velázquez)” (2018), acrylic piping on canvas, diptych, 60 x 48 each, 60 x 96 overall (all images courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted) RIDGEFIELD, Conn. — In the center of a gilded frame, a bubblegum-pink relief tells an intricate story: A brown-skinned figure in a Nike sweatsuit reaches for a kid on a swing as an armed toy soldier points his gun. A playground slide that harkens back to the Barbie Dreamhouse from the 1990s leads into an idyllic pool, while an American flag droops from an ornate balcony. In this reinterpretation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s canonical painting “The Swing” (c. 1767–68), references to 18th-century European aesthetics hide behind Y2K ephemera and tropes of American consumerism, including McDonald’s meals, emoticons, and the Super S that filled the notebook pages of 2000s kids.