Summer Wheat Deferral of a Vanguard

From the article:

“The way Summer Wheat talks about her painting is as gutsy as the work itself. It makes someone like me, with a career based on art talk, sit up and take note. Her humor and transparency are welcome antidotes to all easy catchphrases of cultural criticism that grease the hubris of so much of the contemporary art world.

Equipped with her given name, and with a sly Woody Allen smile Wheat mischievously shares: “I was quite possibly conceived on a drug binge in the late 1970s and delivered by a man named Dr. Beavers in Oklahoma City, Okla.” In a memorable academic lecture last year, she opened with some self-psychoanalysis. “Consider my parents. When I was growing up my father was a lovable obsessive neat fanatic. He would carry a little metal ruler in his pocket to measure proper alignment of his shoes in his closet. My mother was a lovable couldn’t-care-less-about neatness freak. The kind who could put her feet up on the table at dinnertime.”

Therein lies the intensity of Wheat’s work and perhaps the intensity of all aesthetically memorable work: tension. Consider what we get when tension is missing, when everything flows in just one direction: Hallmark films, bad acting and art that spoon-feeds ribbons and bows.”

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