Sean Landers: Woke or Willing

The pale yellow with blue lines of a legal notepad are printed onto twelve canvases before it is stretched over bars and ready for Sean Landers to paint on. Except that the printed canvas is of archival quality it’s much like a jumbo size of the real thing—an existing surface for Landers to apply his thoughts. This easily recognizable background references some paintings and work on paper from earlier in his career, but does little else for this selection of work. The integrity of this work is in the painted text and cartoony imagery that Landers’s applies as if with a permanent marker. In black strokes the artist’s flushes out with what he grapples, his role in and concern for the present social and political climate. Landers literally presents his inner dialogue to the viewers, blurring his personal stance with public concern in a public manner. What comes across a sincere awareness of his white male privilege and consciousness of his success as a middle-aged artist captivates the viewers’ attention and keeps it so that one reads every word on each of the twelve paintings. The message is what people want to hear, and it’s genuine. As a viewer I was nodding, thinking this dude is woke. It was disappointing to learn that the truths Landers painted in these twelve paintings were reiterated in ten other paintings also from 2017. These were presented at the ADAA Art Show in conjunction with this gallery exhibition, as if to differentiate the legal notepad paintings as lesser. In this other series the canvas is covered in paint (i.e. no printed canvas) and more physical labor was involved. The text appears to be carved in the bark of birch or aspen trees, another throw back to earlier works. This referencing to earlier artworks and reiterating of truth makes me think Landers is aware and willing to play into a saleable market instead of argue a point.