Derek Buckner: American Perspectives

To a certain degree painting is the desire and attempt to control our surroundings. Paradoxically, for a painting to succeed I have to— as I’m working on it— feel that I am on the verge of losing that control at all times. Ultimately the work itself should evoke the same feeling of teetering on the edge between resolve and chaos: the real and the unreal. I use video imagery— taken from airplanes, moving cars and scale models of cities created in the studio— as source material for my paintings. After repeated viewing of these videos, the images begin to detach from any specific time or place. It is through working from selected looped segments that I endeavor to capture a particularly modern anxiety.

As a child I had a terrible fear of nuclear war. I would try to imagine what a war would be like, though of course I had no understanding of what could actually happen. My fantasy always included these large grey airplanes looming over the city preparing to drop their bombs. This feeling of imminent doom has taken many forms during my life and yet this early fantasy of invading planes is the most palpable memory I have. In some ways I regard this fantasy as the moment during which the innocence of childhood was lost. I was attracted to the idea of using toy airplanes for this reason. When I first started introducing airplanes into the freeway paintings, it was important to me that it remained ambiguous as to what kind of planes they were and that they weren’t too "real." I wanted to create a space that was both grounded in reality and yet dreamlike— childlike— at the same time.

The airplane is a powerful representation of fear, in that although being a passenger on an airplane is actually relatively safe, because we have absolutely no control over our journey, it can be— for many of us— a terrifying prospect and strong fodder for our imagination. It’s this fantasy aspect that I wanted to explore; I’ve created an intentionally ambiguous scenario— playing with these edges between safety/danger, fantasy/reality. There may be something horrible about to happen or the planes might simply be flying over the freeway on a mundane commuter flight. The not knowing is the essence of the fear.

The "UFO Sightings" series expands on the idea of modern anxiety and the lack of control over our modern environment. The fascination with beings from another world has become fixed in our collective consciousness. We focus our anxieties of life on the idea that there exist other life forms in the universe more advanced that ourselves watching us secretly. We are both fascinated and terrified by this thought. It gives us the sense that there are some sort of beings which are in control in some way over our lives. After researching the many documented UFO sightings and accounts of abductions, I developed the idea of creating a series of paintings based on my own fictional accounts of UFO sightings. These "sightings" never happened yet they feel as if they could be actual sightings documented at some point in time. Ironically, I do not believe in UFO’s, so ultimately, these actual sightings are themselves fictional.

Derek Buckner grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He went on to study at Vassar College and received his B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Italy, Mexico, East Hampton, and Santa Fe. His work is in numerous private and corporate collections in this country and abroad. His most recent show at the George Billis Gallery in New York was reviewed favorably in the New Yorker, The New York Sun as well as other publications. He has also received reviews in the New York Times and the LA Times and was recently selected by Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum for a juried exhibition of young painters.