Meantime Co. is honored to present You Already Know, an installation by artist Pam Butler of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper which are in conversation with each other as well as with Meantime Co's multi-use storefront space. 

Butler’s art is centered on subjects sourced from the din of visual information that permeates our daily lives - images so pervasive and repetitive that we pay them little attention. Too often, the meaning of the images are glossed over and we are redirected away from harder truths. Images of Easter bunnies recur throughout this exhibition; the rabbit, an ancient symbol of fertility, is an image where the meaning has been morphed by our consumerist culture into a faux representation of innocence. Butler digs into how we are manipulated by and complicit with our culture’s parade of iconography. Her art is an examination of how this iconography reflects and reinforces our culture’s rules, stereotypes, and myths. In Butler’s work, questions are raised and aimed at the patriarchy, challenging their use of this visual backdrop which reinforces society’s power hierarchies. Harnessing irony, humor, playfulness, and a fierce assertiveness, Butler takes on everything from Easter bunnies to men in suits, beauty pageant contestants and the canon of Western art.

The visual vocabulary Butler employs are images centered on female archetypes. In the 1990s with the Good Girl Project- she made black and white line drawings of (mostly) young women in a cartoonish style, and paired them with words or phrases such as SLUT, GOOD GIRL, BITCH, SHRILL, and CUTE. Then, she anonymously wheat-pasted the posters to walls around New York City and elsewhere. In a subsequent body of work, Miss America, she decontextualized the beauty pageant’s promotional imagery in watercolor and oils. Butler also attended state and national pageants to make a series of photographs and videos from her seat in the audience. Another project: After Images Before Me takes a personal look at representations of the female nude in Western art. Engaging herself with paintings such as Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Ingres’ “The Source,” and Duchamp’s “Etant Donne” she processes the impact that these paintings have had on herself as an artist, her personal history as a woman, and how these paintings have functioned as cultural messengers.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Butler has exhibited her work regularly since the 1990s  - including shows at Artists Space, White Columns, and Momenta in New York City. Outside of New York, her work has been shown at locations including Delta Axis in Memphis, the Atlanta Museum of Design, Scotland Street Museum and the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art. Her last solo show was in 2017; titled As Object, the show was curated by Leigh LeDare at the Camera Club of New York for their Baxter St. Gallery, New York's oldest artist-run, lens-based non-profit gallery.

In 2010 Butler published The Good Girl Book, as a way to take a deeper dive into the materials first explored in the street project. She also publishes Lotion, a collaborative art project produced as a magazine.

Butler came to New York after first studying art in Oakland at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), and at The University of Buffalo, NY. She arrived in New York City to complete her undergraduate degree through Empire State College’s Studio in New York program, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the history of Western esthetics. She went on to School of Visual Arts, NY to earn her MFA.

The artist owes thanks and gratitude to the Tree of Life Foundation for a project grant in support of this exhibition: www.treeoflifeartists.org.

More information about the artist's work can be seen on her website www.pambutlerart.com.