| Debra Hampton is best known for her psychedelic, mash-up collages of female heroines created from fashion and lifestyle magazine advertisements. To prepare for a work, Hampton scours through hundreds of printed images, selecting objects that signify social power, desire, immortality, and status. The details include luxury cars, jewelry, watches, haute couture, youthful body parts, and beauty products. These symbols are juxtaposed on the works with those representing defense, competition, strength, war, and violence. Each cutout is removed from its original setting, deconstructed, mixed up, and fragmented with thousands of others often beyond recognition. |  |
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
Debra Hampton is best known for her psychedelic, mash-up collages of female heroines created from fashion and lifestyle magazine advertisements. To prepare for a work, Hampton scours through hundreds of printed images, selecting objects that signify social power, desire, immortality, and status. The details include luxury cars, jewelry, watches, haute couture, youthful body parts, and beauty products. These symbols are juxtaposed on the works with those representing defense, competition, strength, war, and violence.
Each cutout is removed from its original setting, deconstructed, mixed up, and fragmented with thousands of others often beyond recognition. Combined with intricately hand-drawn shapes and ink splatters, figures eventually emerge from the swarm of objects. The process is organic, without the use of under-drawings, allowing the work to unexpectedly change directions many times before completion. Once finished, the figures embody the heroic, defeated, beautiful, and grotesque. Hampton intends for these figures to contain and emit duality. They emerge from the cacophony of dissected emblems, while expelling shards of modern entrapment. Hampton’s work is neither meant as an endorsement nor a simple critique. Rather, these portraits are to be considered explorations of material, spiritual, and ethical contradictions that reflect our era.
In addition to mixed-media collages, Hampton has created life-size sculpted armor composed exclusively from post-waste, recycled plastic. In these sculptures, she continues to address themes of excessive consumption, identity politics, historicity, perseverance, transformation, and material relics within a contemporary aesthetic language. The armor is constructed in a similar fashion to the collages, built up piece by piece, with a similar technique of layering and relying on the unique shapes of the discarded plastic to provide character and direction. The material for these works is ironically derived from one of the greatest conflict-causing elements of our time, oil. Like the objects used in the portraits, the armor is made of material representing what we have come to desire, beautify, and value, but also what presents us with danger and harm.
