Cynthia Talmadge: Chevy Chase Syndrome

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce our first exhibition of work by Cynthia Talmadge, a New York based artist known for her paintings, photographs, and installations highlighting the dark side of Americana and tabloid culture. Using a biographical approach to her narratives and often focusing on a real or imagined character, Talmadge’s work exhibits a fascination with heightened emotional states, mediated portrayals of those states, and the spaces where they both converge.
 
In this series of nine paintings, Talmadge depicts the world of a 1970’s American diplomat’s wife. Using her signature Pointillist technique, she documents her character’s mental decline toward anxiety, paranoia and ultimately psychosis with scenes of a diplomatic mission and the ceremonies, aesthetics and protocols that surround it. The paintings will be accompanied by groups of drawings mounted on three linen covered boards, ostensibly by the protagonist’s hand, each set representing a distinct period in the life of the Diplomat’s Wife: the idealistic 60’s, the crazed and paranoid 70’s, and the nostalgic 80’s.
 
Talmadge conducts her own extensive research, and each series of paintings is a blending of fictional and non-fictional elements which allow for the viewer and the artist’s imaginations to intervene. In The Diplomat’s Wife’s Optical Migraine En Route to the Luncheon, Kinshasa, Talmadge creates a faceted, Pointillist image of a diplomatic mission, mimicking the effects of a hallucinatory migraine. Protocol depicts the awkward, anxious moment when the Diplomat’s Wife’s necklace falls to the ground as she digs a hole for a ceremonial tree planting in front of the Bangkok embassy. Other matter of fact depictions of embassies and official residences offer a glimpse into the day to day activities of her character, enhanced by a stippling technique perfectly suited to represent the protagonist’s anxiety and the tenuous nature of her connection to reality and the outside world. As Talmadge describes, “Optical tricks mimic a salad buffet of symptoms, everything from heat stroke to psychedelic psychosis. The Diplomat’s Wife has always looked at the world through the wrong end of the telescope.”