My Parents

Tony Tasset received his artistic training in painting and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has since worked in bronze, wax, still and moving film, and taxidermy. Describing his output as Pop Conceptual, Tasset is just as interested in the fabrication of an object as in its generative idea. He routinely relies on personal elements—his own body, family, garden—“to explore conflicts of the ego and the difficulty in expressing certain sentiments in a postmodern environment where truth is relative, and in a culture of consumption where emotion is a commodity.” In this image of his parents, Tasset intended broader associations than just the apparent subject, as viewers approach the work through their own lenses of memory and nostalgia. Similarly, by mixing the detachment of a minimalist background with the candor and emotion of a family snapshot, Tasset combines high and vernacular art, turning it into a commodity.