Sarah Staton
The hamburger is the quintessential consumer symbol emanating from post-war American culture. This is America in its heyday when everyone believed in the Dream. This is optimistic, expansionist America. Except that there was always another side to the Dream…decay, corruption and a vacuous culture.
“When I was a kid it felt so hip to go out for a hamburger. This was the pre-McDonald’s era and America was cool. This sculpture reflects a nostalgia for a golden age of American optimism. Referencing Warhol and Oldenburg rather than Koons, ‘Post Pop Hamburger’ relates to America as the defining culture of the twentieth century.”
First cast in bronze and subsequently chrome-plated, Sarah Staton’s post-pop hamburger is cartoon-like in its simplicity, at once an object of real desire whilst, being hollow and lumpen in its demeanour, simultaneously displaying its inherent obsolescence.
The Americanisation of the twentieth century was the subject for a series of ‘anti-paintings’ made by Sarah Staton in 1999 using denim and bleach. ‘Post Pop Hamburger’ is the first in a series of sculptures to accompany these works.
