Greg Stimac
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PEELING OUT
In Peeling Out, Greg Stimac presents a sequence of otherwise quiet
country roads
screeching and roaring, as a series of pickup trucks, muscle cars,
motorcycles, and
classic roadsters race with unjustified urgency into the distance.
America’s often
romanticized “ribbons of highway” and “endless byways” become literally
scarred
by such aggressive acts of bravado. With each cut to a new road and a
new vehicle,
a distinct sense of frustration, anger, and aggression grows; tires
spin, rubber
burns, and smoke rises. But then gradually the mood dissipates as each
car eases
out of view, ultimately revealing the utter futility and impotence of
the act itself.
CAR WASH
Stimac’s Car Wash also focuses on a subject that intermittently
screeches – in
this case, a high school girl who poses for passing cars with a handmade
sign,
screaming, “Car wash! Getch your car washed! Over there! Woo-hoo!”
repeatedly
over the rush of traffic. In one sense, the piece celebrates a certain
naïve
entrepreneurial spirit common to the American landscape. Yet as the
video
progresses, the girl’s piercing sales pitch, incessant fake smile,
skimpy neon-pink
dress, and perky cheerleader moves seem to contaminate the innocence of
the
scene with a somewhat desperate, exploitative, and overtly sexualized
tone, typical
within mainstream American commercialism today. Metaphorically at least,
it
could easily be interpreted that a girl standing on a street corner,
dancing and
waving in a skin-tight outfit as passing truckers honk and shout, is
selling more than
a car wash, no matter what her sign might say.
BIOGRAPHY
Greg Stimac explores the American ideologies found in mowing
suburban lawns, campfires, snowmen, roadside memorials erected
after automobile accidents, discarded urine-filled plastic bottles,
and gunplay at unregulated outdoor firing ranges spread throughout
the United States. Stimac’s photographic series, Recoil, is
comprised of images of recreational sport shooters at ranges found
in Missouri and California firing their weapons toward the viewer.
Photographing gun flash, gun smoke, and shell ejection approaches
America’s love of and identity with firearms. In 2005, Stimac received
his B.F.A. in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, and was
awarded an Albert P. Weisman Memorial Fellowship. His photographs
have been shown at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh;
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Stimac was born in Euclid, Ohio in
1976. He currently lives and works in Chicago.