And you think you've got a problem child?
School of Fine Arts professor imagines world without rules, consequences
Caleb Weintraub is an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the Indiana University Bloomington School of Fine Arts. His paintings, videos and printed materials have been widely exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S. and earned numerous awards, including a 2006 New Perspectives Grant from IU. An MFA graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Weintraub will showcase his work in 2007 at Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y., Boston's Galerie Swanström and the historic Haifa Museum of Art in Israel.
Weintraub imagines a futuristic world in which good and evil are indistinguishable, there are no consequences and children turn against their parents and other adults. He uses bubble gum colors -- pinks, purples and deep blues -- to create images that have been described as "beautiful and disturbing, thoughtful and unthinkable, prophetic and profound." He describes his art, and the thoughts behind it, in this artist statement.
Artist Statement
By Caleb Weintraub
This is an imagined future where the boundaries between the perceived world and the virtual world tangle. After generations of religious, governmental and corporate control over the populations of the globe, a reactionary seed has taken root. In time this activity has devolved into an environment of indiscriminate justification, an era of excesses and extremes. And at last even this philosophy of rationalization has become doctrine. Mindless games and absurd rituals are standard practice, the anti-uniform originally designed as a statement in opposition to religious and corporate codes of dress is a compulsory uniform. People who believe in truth of any kind are persecuted. And the same impulses that have been responsible for the greatest social achievements of the West, perhaps of mankind, have left it void of meaning and potential. Children are left without moral compass. The world they know is a world without consequences; they act accordingly, turning against parents, teachers and the adult world. Once in control, they immediately put to practice the system they have grown to understand -- a system of anti-rules. Catastrophe is inevitable but not entirely undesirable, and there is a sense that this deconstruction is a precursor to some greater re-imagining of the space, the world, even the future.
