For the last seven years, my work has drawn inspiration from the multitude of quirky characters and funky forms produced in plastic toys. Most of the toys I have chosen to paint are products of children’s packaged fast food meals thrown away and found in thrift stores and yard sales. The paintings I have created from these discarded playthings often fall into two opposite categories: one being critical of our consumer society, the other being complicit to it. Colorful and glossy, I sometimes painted these small toys in densely packed piles that spoke to me of mass consumerism, chaos and cultural vertigo. Like Maya Lin’s recent sculptures of “asteroids” and installations created from the same kinds of plastic toys, we both see these as “everyday objects whose use-value is ritualistic, emotional, consumerist.” Yet at other times, I have handled them as if they were forgotten treasure. I have set apart special toys and with the eye of a child, focused on them as endearingly as he or she would a favorite plaything, animating them through paint.

If you would like to take a virtual studio tour and see me at work in my Railroad Avenue Studio, please go to my blog: www.MeganMarlattStudioVisit.blogspot.com