Static Bloom | Art Collective
​
August 7 - October 30, 2026
​
Back Gallery
​
​Stuart Asprey | ​Jason Cytacki | Robert Dohrmann
​
​
Our collective practice investigates American culture through material, image, and narrative, using the visual language of popular culture as both subject and strategy. Across ceramics, painting, sculpture, and reclaimed materials, we examine how myth, memory, consumption, and spectacle shape individual and collective identity. Humor—often uneasy, dark, or absurd—functions as a critical tool, allowing us to approach serious cultural questions without moral distance or nostalgia’s softening haze.
We share an interest in material culture as evidence. Everyday objects, surfaces, and forms—vessels, suburban architecture, toys, packaging, debris—become sites where cultural values are encoded, preserved, distorted, or exposed. Our work treats these materials as records of desire, belief, failure, and contradiction, translating the excesses of American life into visual narratives that oscillate between satire and gravity.
While united by content, our approaches diverge in tone and method. One practice embraces ornamentation and graphic storytelling, using ceramics as permanent pictorial documents that fuse folklore, humor, and historical memory. Another interrogates American mythology through theatrical subversion, reframing familiar suburban icons to deflate narratives of exceptionalism and comfort. A third employs reclaimed materials and confrontational assemblage to critique consumerism, environmental collapse, and entrenched power systems with blunt immediacy.
Together, our work reflects a shared skepticism toward idealized narratives and a commitment to making visible the comedies and tragedies embedded in everyday life. We aim to provoke reflection, spark dialogue, and reveal how popular culture—often dismissed as disposable—quietly constructs the myths we live by.
Robert Dohrmann
Artist Statement
​
This body of work incorporates found two-dimensional and three-dimensional materials sourced primarily from thrift stores, flea markets, and antique shops. These materials include oversized romantic print paintings, shadow-box clocks, unplayable LP records, and an eclectic assortment of vintage objects. I often describe this process as a form of cultural anthropology, exploring these spaces to collect inexpensive Americana ephemera. I view them as both museums and consumer graveyards, where relics of material culture await rebirth.
When an object sparks my curiosity, I transform it through a process I call “re-arting,” using remix and mash-up strategies to give it new life and meaning. The aged aesthetic of these materials is central to the work. Each carries a veneer of history that reflects American consumer culture and provides a lens through which to examine contemporary social issues.
My work explores critical themes, including: 1. Middle- and upper-class consumerism, 2. Low-cost mass production and planned obsolescence, 3. The social and emotional dynamics of traditional domestic life, 4. Unchecked capitalist greed, 5. Environmental and climate concerns, 6. Patriarchal power structures, 7. The legacies and dilemmas left for future generations, and 8. White American hierarchies.
In January 2026, I began experimenting with ChatGPT out of curiosity. These images grew from a collection of early 1970s romance comics published by Charlton Comics, whose bold colors and heavy black outlines attracted me despite their often toxic portrayals of masculinity. The process involves supplying reference material, generating countless failed images, digitally compositing elements, and spending 20–25 hours refining results before the printed works are extensively reworked by hand. I came to view this approach as an extension of the collage-based practice I have explored since the 1980s, while also providing a distinct visual complement to the rest of my work.
Through these collages, assemblages, and reworked AI-assisted images, I invite viewers to engage with the intersections of nostalgia, critique, transformation, and the cultural forces that shape contemporary American life.
Artist Bio:
Robert Dohrmann earned his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in 1992 from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. In 1999, he joined the faculty at The University of Oklahoma, where he initially focused on teaching foundation courses. Over the years, his teaching portfolio has expanded to include a variety of studio and art criticism courses. Currently, his primary teaching responsibilities center on drawing, collage and assemblage, and comics and sequential art.
Dohrmann’s work explores critical themes, including: My work explores critical themes, including: 1. Middle- and upper-class consumerism, 2. Low-cost mass production and planned obsolescence, 3. The social and emotional dynamics of traditional domestic life, 4. Unchecked capitalist greed, 5. Environmental and climate concerns, 6. Patriarchal power structures, 7. The legacies and dilemmas left for future generations, and 8. White American hierarchies.
Through his art, Dohrmann invites viewers to reflect on these pressing issues while engaging with the nostalgia, critique, and transformation present in his assemblages.