About the work

Wrench (2021) is a sand painting from Talmadge’s series responding to the original Clue cards from the game’s 1949 edition. Talmadge mixes and applies pigmented sand to an adhesive surface; a children’s hobbyist technique she has scaled up, dramatised, and complicated. In this series, Talmadge probes into how Clue, a murder mystery game devised in 1943, was used as a distraction from the turmoil caused by WWII. The artist’s interest in the dichotomy between violence and glamour is rendered tangible in the six weapon paintings featuring a wrench, knife, lead pipe, revolver, candlestick, and rope.

About the artist

CYNTHIA TALMADGE (b. 1989) is a New York-based artist known for paintings, photographs, and installations featuring subject matter from the romantic dark side of contemporary Americana and tabloid culture. Talmadge’s work exhibits a fascination with heightened emotional states, mediated portrayals of those states, and particularly the places where both converge. While Talmadge’s primary medium is painting, she also designs elaborate interior environments for her work. Talmadge investigates what happens when private personal trauma, nostalgia, loss, and grief come into contact with the institutions of celebrity, money, and malfeasance. Through her use of pointillism and detailed sand paintings, the artist transforms the price inevitability of loss or trauma into something demanding collective examination.