Ginnie Gardiner :
On Massurrealism
1998

Oil paint on canvas via push framers method. Ginnie Gardiner (USA), is a painter who graduated Cornell University as a Fine Artist in 1974. After serving as the youngest Federal Director of a Public Works art project during the 70s at ArtWork in New York, Gardiner went on to produce test commercials and special effects until the mid-80s when she committed her full time output once again to her Chelsea art studio. Held in numerous nationally and internationally noteworthy public and private collections, Gardiner's paintings have been widely shown for fifteen years. She is currently represented by the Pavel Zoubok in New York City and Flanders Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, Minnesota).
 

Excerpt from Massurrealism: A Dossier (Novus Haus, 2004)

"...When I first started working within the framework now being defined as Massurrealism, no such term existed. Artists such as myself worked uneasily under the umbrella of "pop- art" a term which has always implied a certain degree of tongue in cheek about mass culture. I started exploring my Massurrealist subject matter as a producer of test commercials and special effects in the early years of video production and MTV. In the video medium we layered images onto seamless 'push frames' so that the viewer had the feeling of an endlessly revealing landscape. This design format has been employed in my multiple image paintings "See Through You," "Broken Promises." And "Icey Dicey." In these paintings the full panorama can be freed from the constant 4:5 ratio confinement of the TV screen, creating a more flexible, spatial sense.

Video animation tools have played a role in my continuing development as has a direct resonance between my concerns and those of James Rosenquist, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, and more recently in the work of David Salle, artists whom I personally see more as Massurrealists than as post-modern artists. I believe they are continuing a tradition started earlier in our century by photomontage artist John Heartfield and the surrealists Ernst, Magritte and Dali. I'm striving to create a kind of dream state in the viewer's mind, by bringing mass cultural iconography into the context of fine art's historical continuities and combining media imagery in a cubist surrealist structure. Mass culture has relaxed the barriers in most of society so that most people feel comfortable with free associations and "dreaming while awake." We have inherited DADA, collage, montage, digital layering and the electronic manipulation of images. Many video production and post production influences in my paintings created since 1987 include: the fragmented surreal flow of images; collage, fetishized consumer images, fragmentation, multiple or composite imagery, multiple light sourcing, scale shifts, tonal imagery layering with line elements, and push frame design formats. Artists creating montages are involved as editors, selecting and refining and altering fragments. Whether artists today embrace or reject the disjunctive hyperreality of Massurrealism they are nevertheless hyper-aware of it..."