Plastic Dreams

Plastic Dreams is built the way a collage is built, but every element is painted. Upcycled boards are cut and layered into an irregular silhouette, and across those overlapping planes Grande assembles a woman's parted red lips, lit candles, a burst of red and yellow floral pattern, a figure with red hair, and a scatter of comic-book color. The panels sit at slightly different depths, so the work casts its own shadows.

The construction is the point. Rather than compose an image on a flat surface, Grande physically stacks fragments until the picture takes shape, which makes the layering of contemporary visual culture literal instead of metaphorical. Each board holds a different source and a different register of painting.

The subject is the promise that mass imagery makes and does not keep. Advertising close-ups, romance-comic figures, and devotional candlelight are given identical care and identical weight, and the title names the whole apparatus without moralizing about it. Grande's interest is in how these images actually feel, which is seductive.

Hung against a white wall the shaped edge does most of the work. The painting has no frame, no border, and no clear top or bottom, and it occupies the wall as a fragment of something larger that has been cut free.