Rejected!

Kara Maria is a Bay Area artist who I've run into somewhere in the past...maybe a newspaper article, I can't remember. (She's also married to Enrique Chagoya, himself an artist and professor at the greatest university in the world). As is evident in her work, she deals with explicitly political themes while also addressing color and abstraction. Her mixture of smudged background aesthetics and still-shot black and white portraits of politicians remind me of Robert Rauschenberg, perhaps my favorite artist of all time. Maria is working with contemporary public figures, much like Rauschenberg was 50 years ago, but somehow she still manages to evoke a sense of tragic nostalgia with her figures akin to what Rauschenberg did with JFK and others. Her use of color is not just rich and pleasant but also witty in the context of the portraits they accompany (I love the bright pink of the bulldog mama Palin, the crying purple (heart) of McCain, and the jungle colors/black hand hanging behind Obama). But most of all, I appreciate her inclusion of Barack Obama in the rejection portraits. I love the man, we all do, and perhaps that's a problem. I was intrigued to see a iconic rendering of him that replaced the "hope" or "change" tag-line with something more vulnerable, more human.

Rejection 7 (John McCain)
Rejection 9 (Barack Obama)

Rejection 4 (Sarah Palin)