Haunted Trailer Park Jesse Wiedel

On Wiedel: "Hillbilly art"? I stumbled upon great paintings by Jesse Wiedel. I don't know if he's amateur painter or if he cunningly impersonates amateur painter. His works remind me of the stuff I see painted on amusement park rides. — Fuxoft at 21:47 (Blogger from Prague) These are the people I work with every day. —A police officer at Wiedel's opening His art is wacktastic. —Nicole Eisenman He has a hard time rescuing banality in the service of his narrative. —David Hunt

In "Haunted Trailer Park," his first New York painting
show, Jesse Wiedel brings the trailer culture antics
of Raising Arizona to a new pitch of comic
demoralization. His hard-scrabble ne'er-do-wells just
can't get enough of beating themselves up. Demons hang
out and bad people do bad things and they just don't
seem to go away.

Wiedel's everyman style of picture-making blends this
low comedy tomfoolery with the in-your-face moral
directness of Jehova's Witness pamphlets. The
signature color blurs of methamphetamine-induced
psychedelia bleed woefully into abstraction.

This is society on its last legs, in the real-life
vicinity of California's poisoned Salton Sea, where
failures and agonies litter the desert vistas and the
boundaries between living and dead are porous. The
landscape is layered with the wreckage of comfort-food
kitsch of the 1930s–'50s, from when the lake was
almost a thriving resort.

By the 1960s, the massive ecological disaster of
1905–07 that created the lake unleashed its final
legacy in the ongoing and smelly die-off of fish and
birds. It fell off realtors' maps then. And for decades
now, it has been a very cheap place to live. Bikers
love it. Meth pervades. Led Zeppelin still echoes in
the hills. Mainstream consumer culture keeps its
distance. For Wiedel, it is a retreat into the jellied heart
of America.

Jesse Wiedel resides in Eureka, California.

View more images