William Burton Binnie discusses artwork The Vine that Ate the South

William Burton Binnie’s work confronts the American mythos—the imagery enshrouding a land with a complex and often dark and troubling past and present, cloaked in a smokescreen of stoic heroism—as well as larger concerns surrounding notions of power, nationalism, bigotry, war, land, death, and the visual markers connected to each. Distilling a pictorial language from a range of sources–film, photography, politics, history, quotidian life–the artist cannibalizes various techniques and styles, most often in the realm of painting, in order to examine these topics and the social constructs that underpin them. This approach allows the artist to prod the complicated and often paradoxical nature of these issues, allowing space for connections between a range of imagery compiled by the artist over many years. His work straddles a quiet bleakness and subtle humanism, rendering a fraught balance between hope and despair, doubt and belief.