Andrew Wyeth wrote of his painitngs, "I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it... I always want to see the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object." The thing about America is that so much is real and so much is immediately committed to folklore. We are a country of tales, of regions with their own set of campfire themes and somehow over the course of 3,000 plus miles we try and make it all one thing to talk about when we talk about America. Pat Perry, in that tradition of the elusive Americana and what that means, threads a needle of painting the very familar but foreign in the context of fine art. A 7-Eleven store is so common and ubiquitous and yet it's logo is an alien in a museum. With Especially Terrific, a series of new works coordinated by Hashimoto Contemporary on view at Fort Wayne Museum of Art, gives the audience a vantage point of subtle memories, of universality of that meandering idea of what an America is. —Evan Pricco
This exhibition is curated by Josef Zimmerman, Curator of Contemporary Art and is supported by the Edward D. and Ione Auer Foundation.
