ARTIST STATEMENT

R. Scott Whipkey   

My work has evolved from two main points of inspiration, both of which speak to my questions about the relationship between freedom and reality. One is my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, the other my bizarre obsession with a doomed Depression-era family known as the Jakks.

Rockford is a sort of melting pot for the malevolence of modern society; completely over-run with abandoned factories, pre-teen pregnancy, high school dropouts, drug addicts, etc. The residents of the city continue to breed and buy and laugh and eat as if oblivious to the actuality of their surroundings. They seem to create a separate, detached reality. In doing so they raise the question: If reality can truly be a construct of the mind, should we, as people, follow this example and live in denial of the reality imposed upon us?

The disintegration of families like the Jakks presents a further question I thrive to answer: Were these people actually free in their oblivious rationale? My work investigates my boyish desire for freedom within myself detached from those things that are unavoidable in our culture.

I am not criticizing, or even cataloguing, as much as I am attempting to explore the possibility of freedom within Foucault’s Penopticon through the deliberate creation of an alternate truth.  Thus constructing these paranoid, futuristic landscapes around my notion of the nightmarishly romantic reality that I believe to see.