m.sass

I’ve always been suspicious of the stranger that’s too friendly, the street that’s too quiet. I find something slightly menacing about it. That is why I was drawn to create work from the ephemera of the mid-20th century, filled with idealized images of American life. Something didn’t see “right”. The school books and magazine ads of this era portray morally upstanding people living in happy suburban homes brimming with shiny things. But these were also the years during which America was grappling with the aftermath of the Great Depression, a second World War, the perceived threat of Communism, the fear of the bomb, segregation, assassinations, another war … and yet another. In these representations of “everyday life” those threats are not absent but rather made more conspicuous by virtue of their absence. They are images filled with a tension born out of the anxious anticipation of the unknown dangers lurking in shadows that we cannot even see.

I take these images and remove them from their context, juxtaposing them with one another until they create enough dissonance to shake the shadows loose and reveals the absurd, perilous, and fantastic things that reside within them.