Who among us could not use an actual or proverbial rum punch right about now? Multimedia artist Lou Haney’s Rum Punch, our newest edition and first with the artist, is a riot of color and a celebration of form, texture and pattern. The piece integrates a custom-designed textile, spray paint, collage, acrylic and mylar just as deliciously as the ingredients of the timeless tropical libation itself. Haney’s celebratory image glows with a promise of escape, fantasy, warmth and relaxation. Stare at it long enough, and you’ll start hearing a ukelele’s gentle strum and the slidey twang of a steel guitar.Â
Like Haney’s other work, Rum Punch is Kodachrome-vibrant. Her bold usage of vibrant palettes amplifies the potency of her interior and exterior scenes, as well as still life compositions like this one. She is a powerful conjurer of escapist, time-traveling moments, often placing the viewer in environments that look like the Mary Tyler Moore Show's most fabulous sets. Her work prompts direct conversation with objects, evoking visceral memories for those who lived through their usages the first time around. Whether she’s depicting retro daisy cakes, rotary phones, sun-soaked and chrome-legged patio chairs or this larger than life cocktail, the viewer’s desire to jump into the frame and be one with the scene is visceral. Can’t you feel the cool glass in your hand, taste the zesty orange, and hear the clinking ice?
Haney’s aesthetic is informed by the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the mid-1970s to early 1980s, an American school of art that developed to counter Modernism’s overwhelmingly male and Western perspective. While non-Western fine art cultures embraced decorative work, patterned work, and art with applications in the domestic sphere, Modernism certainly did not. Why was a graphic flower screen-printed by Warhol fine art, but a pattern of graphic flowers screen-printed by a woman wallpaper? What about the graphic work lauded in ancient Greece, sacred Islamic art, Japanese woodblock work, or Turkish weavings? Just as the Pattern and Decoration movement progressively blurred the lines of what was and wasn’t accepted, Haney blurs the lines between what is and isn’t fantasy. I think we can all drink to that.Â
