* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Mary Ellen Croteau is an artist whose work directly addresses the absurdities of social norms, and lays bare the underlying bias and sexist assumptions on which our culture is constructed.
Mary explains her work by saying, “The function of the visual in consumer culture is to overwhelm and imprint, rendering us passive vessels for received wisdom. Vast databases of disconnected facts, driven by arcane mathematical formulae rather than by a creative or logical progression of thought, do more to confuse and disconnect us from the information we need to control our world than they do to facilitate it. My work is an attempt to counter this trend toward disembodied ‘intelligence’.
I firmly believe in the power of the visual, and my work is my voice: a social critique and a visual challenge to all the cultural detritus we are force-fed every day. My art is about looking at things in a slightly different way, and is intended to undermine the status quo with wit and humor.”
