With an excellent sense of humor, Nebraska native Rebecca Sittler looks to the history of painting for her compositions. Sittler, who received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, juxtaposes bizarre arrangements of everyday objects with domestic settings, which creates a surreal and startling effect. In her series, "A Spectacle and Nothing Strange", the artist plays with our conceptions of where food, such as potatoes, marshmallows, and sandwiches, should be found around the house and inverts them. She creates similar scenes with non-food related objects in the same series. Her color palette is soothing and controlled, even if the scene's content is ridiculous. One particular image, which is titled "Momento Mori" finds a pile of used muffin wrappers heaped on a plate, with a plastic electric candle in the background. In this photo, Sittler uses two common symbols found in classic paintings, the momento mori, which could be an arrangement of fruit, flowers, or even a skull, which represents the inevitability of death, and the single lit candle, a symbol of God's presence. The contemporary setting and irreverence of the modern objects within a formal context are intriguingly uncouth.
While my work is quite different from Rebecca Sittler's in terms of content, I appreciate her sly and surreal sense of humor. I attempt to bring a similar bizarre quality to my photographs that catches the viewer off guard. My favorite type of image is one that makes the viewer unsure whether he should laugh or remain unsettled.
http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/6525-rebecca-sittler
http://www.rebeccasittler.com/
http://www.florida-arts.org/grants/fellowship/2006/sittler/
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