I'm So Done With Xanax

Katherine Bernhardt’s Done with Xanax exhibition at CANADA gallery filled the walls with bright colored “graffiti” featuring free-formed aliens in quirky situations. Her obsession with aliens started at a young age while living in the suburbs of St. Louis and learning about E.T. theories from her relatives. It also comes from the movie E.T. (1982) by Steven Spielberg. The mysteriousness of extraterrestrial life leads her to explore the fantasies through her artworks. By loosely outline the features of E.T. using spray paints and placing them in human environments, Bernhardt gave “life” to these aliens, creating a playground of imaginations. Halloween in California (2019) and Pepsi (2019) feature the aliens interacting in our society, participating in pop culture events such as Halloween and consuming famous soda drinks. Expressions of these aliens are comically exaggerated and the scribbling style of Bernhardt’s paintings is amusing to the younger audience.

Symbolism is often seen in her artwork. Big bold words, food, and even drugs break the visual hierarchy and lead the audience to wonder about her intentions. These are the significant style of Bernhardt’s pattern paintings and her expressive way of connecting different subjects into one. With the increase of pop music including drug use in their lyrics, Bernhardt combines E.T. and Xanax, obsessions in different decades in her paintings, projecting both her childhood and adulthood’s perspective on conspiracies and pop culture phenomenon. 

Done With Xanax at CANADA gallery