Louis Eisner
In Louis Eisner’s painting Home on the Range (2021), a sleeping figure gripping his pillow slumbers nearby a table on which sits a pair of dentures agape in a drinking glass. Though the subject appears to be smiling, Eisner’s rendition is dark and gruesome, inspired by a Topps gum card produced in 1959 from a series titled “You’ll Die Laughing.” The painting was first presented in an exhibition of the same title, also a nod to the state song of Kansas. Home on the Range belongs to a body of work that explores the imagery and symbolism of the American West, but is subverted by color palette, scale and perspective to suggest a sinister and critical tone. Eisner's work suggests a naivety or obliviousness around colonial pride of manifest destiny, entangled with a history of stolen land, uprooted communities and failed attempts at the American dream.[1]