ABOUT THE COLLECTION
The Green Men series (2022-23) was begun during summer 2014 when eastern Ukrainian separatists engaged in acts of civil war and the Russian Federation annexed Crimea whose territory has been recognized by international law as belonging to Ukraine. The collection has been revised since February 2022 when the Russian military invaded Ukraine under the authority of Vladimir Putin. Interest in this topic has been driven, partly, by the fact that the artist's maternal great grandparents emigrated from Kyiv to the USA during the early 1900s.
The visual source for this collection is appropriated from photojournalistic portraits taken by Marko Djurica (Reuters) whose imagery represents eastern Ukrainian separatists -- known as Green Men -- who seized a government building during 2014 and are shown seated in the same plush, yellow chair.
The concept for The Green Men series adopts the Dadaist photomontage technique, which is the precursor to Photoshop, by layering Djurica's portraits with canonical works created from the Italian High Renaissance until Pop Art -- from Raphael to Warhol -- that represent a figure seated in a chair.
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In The Green Men collection, appropriation -- a visual version of musical "sampling" -- offers a way to have a conversation with the past and present. Specifically, in this series, appropriation functions as a symbol or signifier for how warfare transcends time and space. In so doing, Djurica's photographs and the famous paintings "quoted" from previous artists become the material by which to adhere to Jasper Johns' contemporary dictum to "Take an object, do something to it, and do something else."
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
The Green Men was created by Joel Hollander, a self-trained visual artist and art historian who matriculated in the Big Ten. This series is a departure from Hollander's versatility in the Western descriptive, analytical style as well as Eastern tradition that interprets natural forms expressively through stylized marks and perspective. Alternatively, The Green Men collection utilizes technology (i.e., Photoshop) to leverage the artist's academic training with contemporary appropriation and modern Dada witticism. Hollander's series offers a similar tongue-in-cheek critique about humankind's dysfunctionality and tragic actions driven by power and greed.