Wayne Coe

Statement

 Art reflects how we artists see the world. I try to focus on what I feel and don’t see and then give that psychic experience artistic form.

 The first images I painted were somewhere between history paintings of contemporary events and cinematic fantasy, a genre I was immersed in from commercial work. 9/11 Aural accounts, truths I read about for which I saw no images became my subjects. Framing sensitive war imagery in a fictive movie context, dramatizing brutal truths using movie star surrogates, seemed a negotiated settlement. A lenticular of an office interior, ascending graphs, and happy coworkers turns into a plane tearing through the office, Gotterdammerung, then all's peaceful again, a productive company office. Change without change. Terror without consequences. The war on terror is a show, fictive, unreal, consumer product for US citizens to pass the time.

 Point of Purchase forms, POP, are designed to communicate institutional safety messages but can be reengineered to deliver truths about corporate corruption, and products and pundits' failure to keep us safe. As a notional artist, my journalistic research and interdisciplinary work seek to deliver cognitive dissonance — forbidden in Western media. I’m interested in the media bubble as a political filter where absences, like the absence of Jim Crow in the “

Golden Age of Cinema”.

 I’m drawn to marketing forms, reality-altering forms. What is real when most of us "know" is synthesized state media? What is this birth-to-death pipeline of reality management: state schools, state colleges, corporate-state industry, religion & military, corporate or state retirements, and when “progressives” & "conservatives share the pro-war/debt/billionaire class platform? Many tell me this isn't art talk, but having spent my whole life trying to step out of this artificial information stream, it seems to me the propaganda stream is an artistic form, replete with philosophical and aesthetic dimensions.

 My art reflects back to my youthful experience of state school sensory deprivation. My first war awareness was sans-awareness; the Vietnamese have deep spiritual roots, thousands of years of Buddhism, an agrarian economy, and the worship of ancestors - compared to detached Wayne, removed at age five from nature & locked 12 years a slave in a cinderblock box; detached from my relations, from God, all replaced by artificial "this land is your land", "founding fathers", "one nation under God". Raised rootless Brand PR is often confused with Today's News. Advertising commodifies and replaces the horrific militarized acquisition of assets with comic book villains and terrorist baddies for passive consumption.

Do I accept life experience as a Marvel Universe? Do we quietly accept the war crime of millions killed in the Afghanistan/Iraq TV spectacle corporate branded as “mission accomplished”? Is the streaming genocide good economics, indebting the poor $300 billion so Wall Street can surpass 42,000? The street is quiet, and sunny, kids play at school, the radio reassures me business is excellent (not mentioning 30% war-inflation, taxes up 50%), and Good guys are triumphing over evil.

Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with illustrating the state assassination of Dr. King as explicated in the 1999 MLK assassination conspiracy trial. Not only is it the most gripping procedural I've ever read, it cries out for imaging. I just did an exhibit with the four sniper teams and forensic bullet strings leading from their locations to a Lorraine Balcony mockup so visitors can stand where King stood or stand behind the killing sniper scope. This speaks to my experience: we are all Dr. King, facing overwhelming firepower hiding disguised as friendlys.