YESFERATU
7 December – 26 January, 2002
reception Saturday December 7, 4 – 7 PM
Gallery Sonja Roesch / 2309 Caroline Street
Houston, TX 77004 / (713) 659 5424
Tuesday – Saturday 11 – 6 / www.gallerysonjaroesch.com
Yesferatu, a new collection of work from Hills Snyder, draws upon an array of image and reference both
obvious and obscure. Its clean lines and spare placement stand in contrast to the murky associations of
the source material. Dismantling the mainstream equivalent of Greil Marcus’ “old, weird America,”
Snyder’s derivations on duplicitous historical figures such as Henry Ford and Walt Disney suggest a
bifurcated take on the national character.
Titled for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film of supernatural love, Nosferatu, Snyder’s project promises
to woo the viewer into disturbing territory, all the more troublesome for its reliance on a
color drenched, whimsical appearance.
Private Sector, an image of Henry Ford’s mid-twenties Model T divided into six parts, utilizes corporate
language and antique imagery to suggest social isolation and secretive political maneuvers. Like Disney,
Ford is known for his contribution to 20th century technological innovation, yet during the twenties he also
produced racist tracts.
With Crosscut the word play continues. Titled for Crosscut Saw, the R. G. Ford blues standard of sexual
innuendo made famous by Albert King, the image of a lumberjack’s two-man saw cuts itself,
implicating itself and the tools of cultural co-optation. Private Sector and Crosscut are also peripherally
linked by way of a whispered association with Mississippi blues man T-Model Ford. He, like King, was
born in the twenties just as Murnau’s film was being shown for the first time.
Snyder’s thread-like linking of disparate information is evocative of the slippery hold we have on reality.
The formal appearance of the work only heightens the impact of the underlying content, as with a musical
chord missing its third, which the listener hears anyway. This suppressed narrative calls upon historical
events as well as hearsay, such as the famous quote attributed to Henry Ford, “You can paint it any color,
so long as it's black.” This language, like the artist’s work, also folds back on itself, simultaneously calling
to mind early 20th Century mass production and post-war ab-ex / pop culture associations to Ad Reinhardt and
the Rolling Stones.
The racial pun buried in Ford’s statement about car paint, is extended in Snyder’s piece, Bald Piebald,
in which a black and white minstrelsy smiley face is topped by a pink dome indicative of the color of the
Binnie & Smith crayola, which was labeled “flesh” until the civil rights movement caught up with it in 1962.
A related work, Wild Bill (Nostradamos ‘n’ Andy), attempts to loop language and image in a Gordian knot,
with rope courtesy famous psychics such as Jingles from the Wild Bill Hickock show, not to mention Tonto,
Tinkerbell, and of course, Count Orlok’s Knock or Dracula’s more famous Renfield.
Other works in the show include When You Say That, which conflates a smiley face and the rainbow
stripes of the gay pride banner, and Everybody Has One, in which a quartered smiley face is sub-surmounted
with Snow White’s poison apple, Pinocchio’s nose, Dumbo’s over-sized ears and the cape of The
Headless Horseman.
The combined impact of these works is at once a good-humored festival of visual flair and a perplexed
meditation on histrionic subjectivity careening into ecstatic paranoia. YESFERATU
Private Sector, 2002,
pencil on paper, (6 units), 44 x 75 inches
When You Say That, 2002
red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple mirrored
acrylic sheet on birch support
43 x 43 x 2 inches
Everybody Has One, 2002
pencil on paper, acrylic sheet, (4 units)
41 x 41 inches
Lookout, 2002
black acrylic
12 x 11 inches
Crosscut, 2002
wall paint, birch
142 inches x 296 inches
Swoop, 2002
pink acrylic, fluorescent paint
15x 15 inches
Dr. Chlorophyll, 2002
acrylic mounted Durst print on birch support
57 x 57 x 1 inches
Boogie Man (Theory of The Hollow Earth), 2002
red, yellow, blue, black and white acrylic
sheet on birch support
57 x 57 x 1 inches
Wild Bill (Nostradamos ‘n’ Andy), 2002
acrylic mounted Durst print on birch support
35 x 35 3/4 x 2 inches
Loveboat 1, 2002, variegated acrylic, 18 x 16 inches
Loveboat 2, 2002, variegated acrylic, 16 x 20 inches
Where Are You (While the World Keeps Turning), 2002
pencil on paper, acrylic sheet, (4 units)
41 x 41 inches
Out Of It, 2002
black acrylic
15 x 12 inches
Bald Piebald, 2002
black, white and pink acrylic sheet on birch support
43 x 43 x 2 inches
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