Steve Budington, The Candidate, 2007
Steve Budington's painting, The Candidate, critiques the political campaign by visualising a candidate made entirely of ears listening to a constituency made of eyes.
Do our brains bring us to our senses? What happens when the respective acts of looking and listening have bloomed so fully as to displace other ways of interacting with the world? Drawing on sources ranging from early anatomical studies to current developments in politics, environmental studies, and technologies of outdoor gear and apparel, Steve Budington’s paintings present hyperbolical but familiar situations that highlight the dangers (and humors) of specialization. Consumed by the project of “making sense,” the anatomically altered figures in Budington’s paintings become imagined sites of cultural and evolutionary excess between a brain and an environment that compete, as much as they collaborate, for survival.
