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Kathryn Andrews — WEE MAN FOR PRESIDENT aka Historical Campaign Poster Painting No.3 (The Bird to Bet On)
Kathryn Andrews

WEE MAN FOR PRESIDENT aka Historical Campaign Poster Painting No.3 (The Bird to Bet On)

2015

Occupying nearly the full scale of a campaign billboard, this 2015 work by Los Angeles-based artist Kathryn Andrews fuses the visual language of American political theater with the material logic of Hollywood spectacle. Aluminum, ink, paint, and plexiglas form the work's architectural body, while a certified film costume, embedded within the composition, imports a charged object from the entertainment industry directly into the picture plane. The result is a hybrid construction that refuses easy categorization, functioning simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and prop, collapsing the boundary between manufactured desire and manufactured authority. Andrews has long examined how power circulates through surfaces, particularly those engineered to seduce, persuade, or perform credibility. Here, the campaign poster format serves as both subject and vehicle, its bold graphic conventions borrowed and subtly destabilized. The title layers further complexity, invoking a figure simultaneously diminutive and aspirational, with the parenthetical "The Bird to Bet On" suggesting the speculative economy of elections as much as horse racing. The work belongs to her "Historical Campaign Poster Painting" series, in which the rhetoric of democratic participation is treated as a spectacle indistinguishable from its cinematic counterpart. At 243.8 by 274.3 centimeters, the work commands physical presence in any context, and its institutional provenance, currently offered through the Nasher Sculpture Center in association with David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, places it within a serious critical conversation about American image culture. Collectors acquiring works by Andrews at this scale gain a piece that rewards sustained looking as much as it rewards intellectual engagement, anchoring any collection with pointed wit and formal rigor.

Medium
Aluminum, ink, paint, plexiglas, certified film costume
Overall
Signed
Yes
Location
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX

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About this work

Kathryn Andrews, WEE MAN FOR PRESIDENT aka Historical Campaign Poster Painting No.3 (The Bird to Bet On), 2015

Occupying nearly the full scale of a campaign billboard, this 2015 work by Los Angeles-based artist Kathryn Andrews fuses the visual language of American political theater with the material logic of Hollywood spectacle. Aluminum, ink, paint, and plexiglas form the work's architectural body, while a certified film costume, embedded within the composition, imports a charged object from the entertainment industry directly into the picture plane. The result is a hybrid construction that refuses easy categorization, functioning simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and prop, collapsing the boundary between manufactured desire and manufactured authority. Andrews has long examined how power circulates through surfaces, particularly those engineered to seduce, persuade, or perform credibility. Here, the campaign poster format serves as both subject and vehicle, its bold graphic conventions borrowed and subtly destabilized. The title layers further complexity, invoking a figure simultaneously diminutive and aspirational, with the parenthetical "The Bird to Bet On" suggesting the speculative economy of elections as much as horse racing. The work belongs to her "Historical Campaign Poster Painting" series, in which the rhetoric of democratic participation is treated as a spectacle indistinguishable from its cinematic counterpart. At 243.8 by 274.3 centimeters, the work commands physical presence in any context, and its institutional provenance, currently offered through the Nasher Sculpture Center in association with David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, places it within a serious critical conversation about American image culture. Collectors acquiring works by Andrews at this scale gain a piece that rewards sustained looking as much as it rewards intellectual engagement, anchoring any collection with pointed wit and formal rigor.

Medium
Aluminum, ink, paint, plexiglas, certified film costume
Dimensions
overall: 243.8 x 274.3 x 9.5 cm
Year
2015
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, United States

Related themes

Mohn Art Collective

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