Caleb Weintraub
Cloudy with a Chance of Apocalypse

Cloudy with a chance of apocalypse, 2006, mixed media/wood, 83 x 96"

Jack the Pelican Presents "Cloudy with a Chance of Apocalypse," an exhibition of paintings by Caleb Weintraub. Profusions of cherub-sweet toddlers roam the streets like George Romero's undead, blasting your cherished icons to happy-delicious smithereens.

This is the future, perhaps not so distant. The children have taken over. Weintraub follows the joyous, Uzi-fueled maraudings of their angelic army with pow-pow-pow vigor, kindergarten-craft candy color, sequins and artificial fur. These are high key, manic compositions of biblical proportion. A twisting rush of unthinking empowerment fills the moral void.

This is the third wave of Weintraub's paintings of hyper-violent tots. The second he premiered at Axel Raben Gallery in Chelsea in 2004. The chaos is now even more serpentine, sugared and beaded. Some of the children have begun wearing plastic cartoon-character dinner plates as masks. They venture into the forest in groups to seek out and kill the few surviving adults, who hide out, beyond caring, mustachioed and uniformed in pink inflatable ballerina costumes.

Weintraub--whom some are surprised to learn is a committed practitioner of Orthodox Judaism and the father of two young children--sees this post-sadistic, kiddy-pop future of rampant hunger for stimulation and complete desensitization to violence as the logical conclusion of our society's moral collapse. Adults represent for him, on one level, the failed ideologies that rule the world; and children, our future. Afraid of extremists, he is hardly in favor of violence. But the cleansing apocalyptic outcome is, for him, not entirely undesirable. He explores similar themes as a guitarist and singer in the indie art rock band Teeth for Life.

Caleb's enormous Party Favors plays a starring role in "Contemporary Imagings: The Howard A. and Judith Tullman Collection," which runs through January 2007 at the Mobile Museum of Art Recent solo shows include "...With the Bathwater," curated by Cheryl Harper at Projects gallery in Philadelphia this past fall, and, in 2005, "When the Bough Breaks" at Axel Raben in Chelsea, "See How They Run" at Galerie Swanstrom in Boston and "Pop Goes the Apocalypse" at Redux Contemporary in Charleston. Jack the Pelican featured his work at the Nova Young Art Fair in Chicago, 2005.

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