CLAY STINNETT: HONKYTONK LAGOON
Clay Stinnett completed his BFA in Drawing and Painting from The University of North Texas in 2004, Stinnett has established a reputation around Dallas for his active participation in the local art scene and a creative energy that is matched by few peers. Stinnett creates vibrant likenesses of figures from pop culture, recontextualizing familiar images in a realm of psychedelic flora and fauna. His hybrid works, neon-hued and surging like live wires, are designed to “overstimulate, entertain, and confound.”
EXHIBITION DATES: November 4, 2023–January 13, 2023
Making sense of Clay Stinnett’s paintings in his solo show Honky Tonk Lagoon at Fort Works Art is like trying to learn the trajectories and backstories of every piece of flotsam rattling around the floorboards of your car while you’re floating in the midst of rolling it five times on the freeway, simultaneously processing that the cause of these chaotic vehicular acrobatics was an Instagram post you glanced at that had an old Taco Bell sign in the background.
Clay Stinnett’s paintings are lowbrow and funny but so densely packed and chaotic that their trashy cornpone aesthetic ends up being a Trojan horse for what is actually fine art. Even when they’re monochromatic, there’s a narrative, or at least the impression that there is a narrative, like seeing the middle part of someone else’s dream in the middle part of your own dream, one where the ending is just out of reach behind the sign-off test pattern of a UHF station in purgatory.