No Joy in Mudville | An Exhibition by Eric Mesko

Abstract

Excerpt from essay by Dick Goody: "The art of Eric Mesko evokes a powerful sense of memory, place and ideology. These are the chief themes that reveal themselves and the revelation is often abrupt, comic and urgent. His images and structures transmit an emphatic polemic vision. Mesko is an artist on a mission and his vanguard, postindustrial production presents a cultural critique of western immoderation. He is also a nonconformist whose work cannot be neatly placed into a single context, and he is delighted by this dichotomy. Defining Eric Mesko's raw output is a formidable task. Despite the futility inherent in classifying his oeuvre, any critical analysis of his work must first attempt to place it contextually within the contemporary art scene because he operates within this milieu. To accomplish this endeavor it is constructive to describe the outward appearance of his art, but before that, let us briefly examine the contemporary scene."