In the weeks leading up to the opening of the group show Irrational Exuberance on April 30, we are interviewing the artists to learn more about them, their work, and how they have been impacted by the recession.

Tate Foley
St. Louis, Missouri

Tate Foley, Oil

Tate Foley was born in Millerton, a small, rural town in Northcentral Pennsylvania. He received his BA in Studio Art in 2007 from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and his MFA in Printmaking in 2010 from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. His work was recently exhibited in New York City, Washington D.C., Portland, Saint Louis, Cleveland, and purchased by both Yale University and Reed College libraries. With a broad and deep knowledge of disciplines, coupled with a printmaking core, Foley creates works that pervert relationships between images and text to raise new questions about ideas. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art/Visiting Artist at the Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts at Webster University in Saint Louis.

Q: What is your artistic background?
A: I am a printmaker by birth, but do a lot of drawing (digital and non-digital) when appropriate. I will defend printmakers’ superiority over painters until the day I die.

Q: Tell us about the art you will exhibit.
A: My current body of work compartmentalizes recent news events into critiques of American history, politics, and culture. This work becomes a catalogued collection of satirical images that allow transparency and social reflection. To aid this social reflection, vernacular imagery and text are twisted and perverted to question the ideas of consumption, desire, idealism, personal gain and greed. Just as new words are created each day because of changes in culture, advances in technology, and social failings, text is adapted, appropriated and subsequently altered to draw contrast between the source text and the newly created text. Frenemy, bromance, defriend, top kill, junk shot, and refudiate are a few examples of this idea; their new definition is a perversion and addendum to the original.

Q: What is irrationally exuberant about your art?
A: The work glorifies economic consumption and lack of economic autonomy, government spending, the effects of the white race, purchased immortality, ulterior motives, and unending greed.

Q: Has the recession impacted your art?
A: Perfectly. It gives me tons of material to work with.

Q: In your experience, do hard economic times hurt or help art?
A: Definitely hurt. So long, NEA.

View Tate Foley’s website.

Irrational Exuberance will show April 30 to May 8 at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.