Alien Abduction 2007

Editor: Well, that's certainly... striking. It’s got a pulp magazine cover feel. Very immediate and theatrical. Curator: Indeed. This is Greg Hildebrandt's "Alien Abduction," created in 2007 with acrylics on illustration board. The piece unabashedly plunges into the well-worn science fiction trope. The color relationships play on both surreal lighting, with clashing color values, and pulp aesthetic through an eroticized subject matter, producing visual disharmony. Editor: The imagery is so loaded, isn’t it? The blonde woman—archetypal, vulnerable, the looming figures with the "Greys," as popularized by the UFO phenomenon, it's a veritable playground for the anxieties projected in abduction scenarios. There's a strange ambiguity, too, that I'd expect aliens from outer space not to exist as humanoid forms. The figures appear caricatural; look how shiny and smooth they are and how cartoon-like the weapon held by the creature on the left is. They act in many ways that human characters would act in erotic scenarios, from touching the woman to eyeing the audience from below. Curator: The stark contrast is the central point to dissect this canvas—both in its use of tonal contrast and color. Observe how Hildebrandt uses high chroma colors for his light source, the alien craft hovering behind her bedroom window, clashing directly with the local coloration in the room, from dull blues, lavenders and greens. Note as well how her central location to the pictorial composition renders a formal device through both central placement and by use of dramatic scale that the human brain relates to when interpreting dominance, power and action on display. It begs the viewer to accept a strange, surreal and jarring environment without further questioning the underlying symbolism, themes or historical narrative that surrounds art with more symbolic complexity. Editor: Precisely, which might make us consider these alien abduction narratives. It seems like a late-20th-century manifestation of older folklore, updated with sci-fi technology, and projected fears over the unknown. Are we talking about sexual fantasies, power imbalances, and what those bulbous eyes might signify? There’s cultural anxieties being worked out. Curator: An apt parallel to older, symbolically denser, mythical tropes, filtered now through the genre of fantastical and futuristic lenses—simplified. A modern iconography made more transparent, immediate in appeal to basic emotive experience; lust, dread and desire simplified within composition to produce instant affect without dense visual information to decipher, that much like advertisement design; directs consumption towards simple needs made visually enticing. Editor: So, instead of minotaurs, we get grey aliens holding ray guns. Very interesting! Curator: Art is always interesting!