Dragon, Crab, and Turtle is proud to present Adam Lavigne's (b. 1988) debut solo exhibition "Hamburgers Today."   
​
The exhibition centers on a seemingly banal food item, the hamburger. These paintings and sculptures of burgers, augmented to permit the proper degree of scrutiny (a few adorned with googly eyes), compel us to recognize that a burger is never just a burger: Objects of everyday life, such as the fast-food sandwich, always exceed their status as given or meaningless. Lavigne's inventive technique for his paintings, assembling his own custom panels and wrapping the canvas by hand, affords no blank space to distract from the subject: The canvas itself takes on the precise shape of a burger. The paintings do not "depict" an image within a larger canvas; the painting itself "is" a burger.

Lavigne's work reminds us that a consumer object can never return to its putative origins as a simple thing-among-things; the burger, advertised for a given fast-food chain, can never return to an idealized state of pure sustenance. A burger is more than a caloric source of protein, carbohydrates, iron, and sugar. Bound up in the perfect signifier of a burger are all the cultural designations of nation, marketing, capital, and consumption. A burger consists of bun, cheese, cow-meat, ketchup, pickles, and occasionally mustard; a burger is artificially colored and aesthetically pleasing; a burger is planned and constructed; a burger is sold and eaten; a burger is a nation-symbol; a burger is meaningful.

These burger-symbols are displayed in a Warholian impartial manner-they are not commentary pieces; there is no imposition of the artist's subjectivity. The burgers are the same as those found in the advertisements that saturate our lives, instead rendered with paintbrush and, in the case of the sculptures, foam, acrylic, and plaster. Yet, despite these being pictorial reproductions of advertised fast-food chain burgers, an implicit change—a form of non-religious transubstantiation-occurs when the image is extricated from a coupon or billboard onto the lauded white walls of an art gallery. Somehow, this image of an actual object takes on a dimension of reality it lacked before— it becomes more substantive and corporeal. At the same time, they paradoxically lack the immediate physicality and literalness that the burger-object has and that the photograph implies. The strokes on the canvas, imperfect and anti-real, invoke the mimesis of the burger-image. If the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard tells us, "It's not blood, it's red," then Lavigne's work responds, "It's not a pickle, it's green." Both acknowledge a foundational truth about the image and its relation to the world.

Opens Saturday, November 2, 2024 from 5pm - 7pm at Dragon Crab and Turtle. 2814, Locust Street, St. Louis, Mo 63103

Written by Teddy Duncan Jr.

Inquire for availability and prices