Seattle’s Aurora Avenue and other gateways to marginalized blight have their own poet. Kristen T. Ramirez makes these no-exit avenues of cheap dreams new again. She mines the noisy collision of mid-20th Century textures, colors, styles and cultural contrasts found in America. Ranch-style gas stations, the curving arrows beckoning you in, the birds on phone wires, the invitations to eat cheap, sleep in easy reach of a TV and buy a beater car become a survivalist’s manual for a people’s art form.
Her collages are her signature, but not her only one. Advertising in other contexts becomes less benign.
Incised into bottles are messages pulled from the country’s vast stash of cliches: Up and at ’em.
Ramirez’s Ghosts of Commerce Past is at Grey Gallery through Dec. 5.
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