Cynthia TALMADGE
Walk of Fame, 2023
Terrazzo, cement, marble chips and brass inlay
94 x 92.7 x 2.5 cm
(37 x 36 1/2 x 1 in)

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“Alan Smithee” is a pseudonym used by Hollywood directors to remove their names from movies over which they have lost creative control. Cynthia Talmadge animates Smithee, imagining him in the mid-1980s as a down-on-his-luck, middle-aged baby boomer, trying, elaborately but ineptly, to revive a career defined by burned bridges, bad behavior, and commercial failure. The only substance to the real-world “Smithee” is an extensive filmography of more than 80 credits. Talmadge takes this output at face value, envisioning the detailed biography and personality of a director whose career persists despite every job he’s done having gone badly awry amidst professional conflict. For TALMADGE, this makes him a dubious American icon: an epitome of privilege and unwarranted confidence; a guy who – at least until recently – could only ever fail up.

Cynthia TALMADGE
Walk of Fame, 2023
Terrazzo, cement, marble chips and brass inlay
94 x 92.7 x 2.5 cm
(37 x 36 1/2 x 1 in)
Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Cynthia TALMADGE is a New York-based artist known for paintings, photographs, and installations featuring subject matter from the romantic dark side of contemporary Americana and tabloid culture. Talmadge’s work exhibits a fascination with heightened emotional states, mediated portrayals of those states, and particularly the places where both converge.

While TALMADGE’s primary medium is painting, she also designs elaborate interior environments for her work. Her 2018 New York solo show 1076 Madison consisted of eight paintings of the venerable Frank E. Campbell funeral home. Her 2017 debut solo show, Leaves of Absence, consisted of life-sized photographs of meticulously styled sets depicting celebrity rehabs alongside an architectural installation reconstructing a fragment of an imagined room from McLean Hospital. By viewing a funeral parlor or a treatment center through the conventions of pointillism or midcentury melodramas, she transforms the private inevitability of loss or trauma into something demanding collective examination. Most recently, TALMADGE held an exhibition at Bortolami Gallery in New York City titled Goodbye to All This: Alan Smithee Off Broadway.

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