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A movement called "thrift store unconscious" - that "every image has the right to exist beyond its aesthetic quality" - that images exist because someone somewhere, regardless of skill or self-awareness to conceptually edit their mental garbage, had the desire for garbage. Paintings like a physical wish, and these ones just happen to be kinda gross. Someone cared enough to make these. This desire "speaks" - has meaning, a subject appears, however abject, the grey slime of the human, in paint form.
"The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious."
"These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see," Jim Shaw's thrifted paintings.