Virginia Yount

Austin based artist Virginia Yount presents paintings, collages, and sculptures that depict a near-future society of hoarders, shut-ins and escapists. The inhabitants of this world are ominously not present, or fearfully shutting out the toxic emptiness of their environment and hunkering down with their belongings for the coming storm.

Yount’s work describes imaginary architectures and landscapes comprised of such things as anxious piles of clutter, unread books, graffiti-covered land, discarded lottery tickets, paint piles, and the gathered remnants of a struggling society.

Simultaneously a vast, empty, lonely American landscape and an intimate and obsessively arranged space, Yount’s paintings peer in and zoom out, shifting perspective. A hippie commune dome made from the artists own collection of unread books, a new-age beachhouse filled with prisms and paperweights, a copse of graffiti-covered trees spewing ’emotion’ under watchful surveillance are some of the images that populate this world.

In addition to the paintings, Yount will present “Throw Cash into the Wind” a collection of several architectural structures arranged on a precarious floating trash-island environment. Meant to signify a kind of wishing fountain, her ecosystem takes on the question of a sustainable society based on the principals of excessive consumption and waste.

Through images of crisis and escapism, Yount investigates sustainability and failure to adapt to unstable and fast-changing surroundings. Environmental and economic collapse, surveillance/self-obsession, anxiety and hoarding/collecting are all a part of her works’ conceptual and socio-political concerns.