I am a product, in the General Mills or Proctor & Gamble sense, of the first generation hyper-consumers.  We are the post-boomer tweeters, nourished on a sugary diet of Saturday morning cartoons, Pink Floyd album covers, and iron-on Tees.  We took the Pepsi Challenge, drank the "be all you can be" Kool-Aid and clicked through the nations first 24 cable channels at infrared speed.  Not asking why anyone would watch music on a television but asking why the eight D batteries in our luggage sized boom box wouldn't last longer.  We found our identities on MTV, on billboards, in McDonald's Happy Meals, and at the Chuck E Cheese video arcade in the pea-sized 5 acre suburban malls.

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And then we passed the Mountain Dew to Generation X, Hip-Hop urban settlers, and mall rats now on digital tilt consuming the aisles and isles of magazine racks at Barnes & Noble while blogging over a cup of joe at the Starbucks inside.  They are the mediators of multi-media, streaming through their social networks and broadcasting themselves to remote corners of the world, forming, consuming, and disposing of the Freudian ID in a World Wide Way.  A generation contracting their mutltiple, and often virtual, identities as a composite of Big Boy wanna-bees, DKNY brandishers, and Juicy Couture (self-imposed) celebs.

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Considering these influences, the Identity Crisis series explores the commoditization of identity, the person as product, the branding of me.  Appropriately enough I believe, through a simplified media of paint and marker, I investigate the mutually non-exclusive blurring of consumer and consumption.  The "we are what we consume" materializations of identity in contemporary culture.  The topic of the series came first and pointed me immediately to an advertising aesthetic in executing paintings of the narrative.

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The pieces are created in the same fashion as early advertising....drawing to produce a layout, masking the layout, coloring, masking other areas, coloring again and so on until a built-up but flattened image is composed.  The work is intended to remove many of the traces of the artist's hand (metaphorically the individual), advancing the Warhol Pop Art aesthetic of mass production but in technical opposition as an individual, unique painting.  Perhaps juxtaposition to the series topic one might conclude.  The UPC'd figure is recurring in the work, speaking blatantly to the body, and our identity, as an article of commerce.  And the restricted palette purposefully narrows the attention to the figure in the its composition, leaving the work resemble advertisements themselves.

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Chris Hauck, 2007