I Paint the Body Electric

from The LocaL, April-May 2021

From Bare Roots to the Food Mill

The Art of Christine Cannon

By Erick Richman

The subjects Christine Cannon paints are strikingly familiar; their faces remind us of our coworkers, our friends, perhaps even our family. Though clearly mechanized and artificial, her emotive portraits create an unease that invites the viewer to question the most basic of human relationships in the modern, technologically mediated world.

Though the LaGrange, Georgia native now has a fulfilling career teaching art at Chattahoochee Valley Community College, the portraits began as a way to process the dehumanizing frustration of waiting tables amid the economic fallout of the Great Recession that began in late 2007.

“I had these synthetic interactions with people,” she recalls, “Nobody was tipping. Everybody was upset. It was a hard moment.”

As earnings slowed, savings drained, and retirement accounts vanished, she began to see more and more “perpetually unhappy” customers, some of whom exploited the power dynamic between server and customer “as a way to abuse others.”

That’s when the robots began, first as simple sketches of the people she served, then growing into coloring books and, eventually, paintings.

“They were a funny way of coping with the mundane despair of waiting tables, feeling like people didn’t see me as human anymore,” she says.

The robots take on a new, yet similar sense of relevance in the shadow of 2020, with many low-wage employees being declared ‘essential workers’ and forced to endure not just the threat of coronavirus, but irate customers frustrated by restrictions, unknowns, and fear.

Professor Erica Adams intended to give her undergraduate art students at Columbus State University a lesson on printmaking when she introduced them to Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation, a treatise on the relationships between people, symbols, and society; for Christine, the reading had a far more profound impact.

“I started really considering synthetic experience” she says, looking into how we form personal relationships with the media we consume, finding her experiences reflected in her favorite works, such as Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the anime Ghost in the Shell, and Matt Groening’s Futurama.

“This is why I really love Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide, we have this really intelligent thing that is created with a human personality, sentience, but it’s still created to do these menial, banal tasks, right? And there’s something kind of emotionally crippling for him with that. I was experiencing a little of that waiting tables because people don’t treat you like a real person a lot of times.”

Marvin the Paranoid Android has a very human – in his case, morose – personality, just like the subjects in her portraits with their trinkets and companions. Futurama’s Bender Bending Rodriguez, a self-aware bending machine who steals and smokes cigars, was clearly influenced by both Douglas Adams and Baudrillard; her work was influenced by all three.

“It’s almost like a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.”

Her paintings are brimming with references waiting to be found by those with a similar “artistic vocabulary,” as she describes it.

**Don’t Look to the Rockets for Salvation**
cannonarts.com

For example, the headphones of the coffeedessert-drinking “Frappé” are modeled after one of the earliest robots ever put on film: Maria theMaschinenmensch from Metropolis, a pioneering dystopian science fiction film released in 1927, roughly two years before Baudrillard was born.

Her “Totems’’ series, the results of her graduate school experiences in South Carolina and Italy, is similarly recursive, similarly focused on symbology. Basing new compositions on her study of religious artwork, she began exploring the concept of symbols more abstractly, resulting in strange collusions of familiar images.

“My world grew so much,” she says, “I was looking at pop art, but also medieval illuminated manuscripts, and how they can lose their meaning over time. Reflecting on things that feel very familiar, but they feel sort of disjointed, because that’s how information arrives to us. Without context.”

After completing her graduate degree, her work began to take on more influences from advertising and graphic design, owing both to the growing omnipresence of advertising in the 2010s and her new role as a teacher.

With the move to online learning in early 2020, her “happy fuzzy moments in the classroom” with students suddenly became “teaching to blank ugly boxes.”

“I noticed this year that my work was getting, kind of like a little darker, and a little more baroque,” she says. Her 2020 works include the “Garbaggio” series, which contrasts discarded food containers with worms, plants and other life in the style of Caravaggio’s bubonic plagueinfluenced, dramatically lit depictions of bloody historical moments.

Students ask her, “‘how can you talk about people being dead?’”

She responds, “How can you not?”

The most recent series is “more playful and less dramatic than Carvaggio’s work, but there’s still that sense of loss and trying to find some kind of humor and entertainment in it.”

Narratives on sentient intelligences often speak to the very human awareness of death, with notable examples of synthetic intelligences featured in 2015’s Fallout 4, 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, and television series such as Westworld and WandaVision. Like the subjects of those works, her robots and totems raise questions about human existence and our relationships to technology and symbols.

**Garbaggio 6 Thrashbarg’s Perfectly Normal Roast Beast**
cannonarts.com

“I’ve had people react to my work in strangely aggressive ways,” she laughs. “There is nothing about the totems that is truly terrifying, so it’s whatever they’re reading into it that’s making them have that reflection on me.”

In 2020, videos of employees facing vocal (sometimes even violent) outbursts by customers incensed at mask mandates went viral online, mirroring the economic tension vented at servers over a decade ago. Aggressive reactions to Christine’s work, like the dramatic flareups of the Great Recession and coronavirus pandemic, speak to the difficulty of processing complex, unpleasant emotions in a world filled with technological distractions and ancient frustrations.

“People get addicted to anger,” she says, “They don’t really understand how to feel anything else, and it’s their way to feeling something.”

The robots, totems, and “Garbaggios” all share an awareness of impermanence as well as strong elements of deep humor and genuine affection.

“It took me a long time to accept that my work, a lot of times, was about joy and being happy… because I wanted to be a serious artist, right? I wanted people to take my work seriously, but that’s a conflict, right? Because I’m painting robots riding horses and like, you know, a hot dog eating robot, these really kind of ridiculous things like that, that are totally goofy.”

Like the robots who cradle their pets and smoke their cigarettes despite their inhumanity, she suggests, people found unique ways of gaining inspiration and fulfillment in a year filled with fear and division.

“We lost half a million people because of a plague and we’re each sitting here deciding what in the midst of all this can bring us a little bit of joy.”

For her, that feeling comes from connecting with others through her art and supporting her students in expressing themselves, as well as developing practical and professional skills.

Christine’s work can be found on her website, cannonarts.com, which includes links to her Instagram and Facebook, where she posts updates about her work and upcoming shows. She also sells prints, jewelry, patches, and other merchandise on her Etsy store, CannonArts. Many of her physical works are on display and available for purchase at the Heritage Arts Center 541 2nd Avenue.