Savage Suburbia
 (Excerpt from "Savage Suburbia" by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert)

Wes Christensen

A shaper of intriguing metaphorical narratives of singular ambiguity,
Wes Christensen exercises a skill and subtlety as a draftsman that
reinforces the strength of his images and renders his powerful,
perplexing, sign-loaded scenes still more compellingly convincing.

With a surface gentleness which subverts their intrinsic menace,
Christensen builds dramatic vignettes of persons engaged in seemingly
innocuous activities which mask ominous incipient events.  Like the
films of David Lynch, or like Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," in
which the "normal townspeople calmly select a citizen to be sacrificed
by stoning.  Christensen's compositions speak of ordinary, everyday
endeavors and settings hiding unspeakable practices and unnatural acts.

In Purple Heart, a paraphrase of the classical painting "Achilles
Binding the Wounds of Patroclus, "we see a contemporary equivalent for
Trojan War heroes in the form of a wincing, tee-shirted, half-clad man
being bandaged by a punk comrade in slit-kneed jeans and a Mohawk
coiffure in place of a plumed battle helmet.

In Countertransference, two men, one older, the other young, sit facing
one another in a quiet parlor.  One holds a harp, the other a shotgun. 
As with so many of Christensen's devilish allegories, questions arise:
Who has transferred roles with whom?  Does the man with the gun intend
suicide?  Does the harp signify art?  Is one a muse for the other? 
Does the fragile balance between harp and gun symbolize that between
civilization and savagery?

In Foundation Deposit, a suburban couple spend a languid afternoon
planting a mysterious bundle in the back yard of their home; while the
man leans casually on the handle of a spade, patiently awaiting orders
 from his wife, who kneels to read a map as the family dog stands
majestically framed by a French door where flames seem to leap inside
the house.

In Covert Operation, a young woman is snipping a strip of fabric from
the lining of a trenchcoat worn by a sleeping man.  Alongside him are a
carafe and a coffee cup; all around is a tangle of prehistoric
vegetation which lends an air of primitivism to what unfolds as another
episode in Christensen's vexing repertoire of hermeticism and
insularity.

Complex investigations of trust and betrayal, guilt and self-doubt,
crime and violations of the social contract, the dramatic works of
Sandusky, Hess and Christensen not only quote and reinterpret classical
myths, but conspire to create a new mythology suggesting that Elysium
is undermined and Elm Street pocked by sinkholes and offering up the
idea that the sanctity of hearth and home, and the calm and serenity of
domestic bliss occupy, like the outer layer of the earth itself, a thin
epidermis on a huge sphere of fire and molten rock.

©Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, "Savage Suburbia: Three Southern California
Painters and the Myth of Domestic Tranquility," Panik #5, 1998, Long
Beach, California.