| CHAD WENTZEL |
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| Chad Wentzel,
a native to the Seattle area, earned a BFA in Printmaking and a
BA in Interdiciplinary Visual Arts from the University of Washington
in 2004. His work is made from an unencumbered perspective of boyhood, where the world is infinite and full of curiosities. It is not a boyhood of naivete, but rather of awareness of the world’s woes with the choice to revel in the bliss offered by childhood. This stance is both impractical and irresponsible, but it mimics the obsession American culture has with itself, ignoring so many tragedies in the world. Rather than taking an overtly critical stance toward this theme, he embraces it and celebrates the fiasco that is American life. He draws his inspiration from the excessive objects of the Baroque using them to act as symbols for the unnecessary in American culture. By manipulating symbols of grandeur he commemorates the ridiculous and embraces the excess of modern life, drawing the parallels between the engulfing power of the beauty the palace of Versailles and the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip. He is interested in the fact that two such drastically different cultural phenomena use excess in such a similar manner and attempts to replicate their intersection. |
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