While it’d be easy to pass Johnson’s work off as base commentary on our “Fast Food Nation,” I feel her paintings go beyond mere cautionary nutritional tales and into the murky realm of advertising’s intersection with identity. American culture (especially youth culture) is inundated with visual messages from marketers repeatedly associating cheap, unhealthy food with the concept of fulfillment and pleasure. Huge burgers and donuts are often presented taking up the whole length and width of a magazine page, or a TV screen. There’s nowhere to look outside of the Pop Tart, the cupcake: it’s everything. And after enough repetition, the message sinks in: not only is the Big Mac everything, it’s your everything. Advertisers strive to cauterize that bond, to make their cheap food products a vital part of your identity– to convince you that you’d feel empty in their absence.

Johnson’s paintings are dark caricatures of this unspoken marketing manifesto. They offer us the same familiar foods on enormous canvases– but instead of charming us into submission, these images overwhelm us with their eerie meaninglessness. Worse: they remind us of how irrevocably affixed we’ve become to their sugary, colorful, high fructose symbolism. Because no matter how menacing these towers of PBJ’s may appear, they still make me kinda hungry. Like Pavlov’s Dog, Americans have become trained to respond with an almost erotic desire towards the all-too-familiar imagery of idealized junk food. And Johnson’s totally cock-blocking that love affair, with her own highly nuanced brand of creepiness.

+ Interview with Pamela Johnson at Neotericart
+ Video interview with Johnson from Bad at Sports