M. LeBlanc, Chicago
Marika Thunder & Cameron Spartley & Ben Foch
For Art-o-rama 2025, M. LeBlanc presents the works of three American artists – Ben Foch, Cameron Spratley, and Marika Thunder. Each artist of the gallery was chosen for the relevancy of their work and its reflection of America’s current socio-political state.
Raised in South Texas, and now based for a number of years in New York, painter Marika Thunder creates gorgeous compositions of junkyard vehicles that tease at the often unseen tension between representation and the abstract. Crushed doors, broken carburetors, twisted fenders meld poetically to reflect on the nation’s culture or waste, exhaustion, and the remnants left by the United States’ deindustrialization.
The ever present chaos in Cameron Spratley’s work reflects the schizophrenic nature of being young and black in America. His imagery references street culture with a focus on police killings, black on black crime, and the parasitic nature of the entertainment industry which capitalizes upon the aftermath. Spratley’s ciphered lexicon reveals methods of self-defense and self-care as strategies of survival. Using the mechanisms of racism against itself, the work is purposefully abrasive. If you can get past the surface, remove the mask, or get to know them, the vulnerabilities and references become clear. However, a relationship is required to do so.
For the past few years, Chicago artist Ben Foch has created uncanny paintings whose imagery originates in processes of artificial intelligence. Prompting an AI bot with sections of text, Foch chooses one of hundreds of output compositions to render. A masterful trompe l’oeil painter, Foch takes this digital image, painstakingly painting it by hand and returning it to the analog work. The result are works that blur the boundary between real life and the online world, and between auto-machinic learning and the human hand.
