Chris Oatey uses drawing to deconstruct icons in a way that forces us to reconsider our relationship to popular imagery. Shana Nys Dambrot writes “Chris Oatey’s insanely obsessive drawings of mushroom clouds, constructed of thousands of individual circular marks, explores the iconic silhouette in an ironic and dramatic act of careful craft, but also bespeaks a kind of madness in its expressive compulsion toward perfection in human endeavors.” The mushroom clouds are derivative from photographs of nuclear tests whose names were given from the shape the cloud had formed in each photographed. He removes the spectacular characteristics of the photograph while reconstructing the spectacle through drawing, devoid of color and scale.

Oatey’s most recent drawings are a part his larger investigation entitled Wallpaper of Champions, which looks at how sports are valued in our culture, in this case through the pairing of athlete and spectator. An image of marathon runners is placed next to an image of a crowd, both recognizably different in content, yet aesthetically similar. It is within this space where Oatey plays on temporality and social culture, carefully constructing each image in a way that allows us to think about our relationship to sports imagery and its ability to seduce us visually.




Oatey has shown at See Line Gallery, in the LA Weekly Biennial at Track 16 Gallery, and in the Forum Invitational at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Oatey was born in Cleveland, OH and received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.