Keith Mayerson, Cheech & Chong, 2023. Oil on linen, 48 × 64 in. (121.92 × 162.56 cm). Courtesy the artist and Karma

Keith Mayerson has been working on his My American Dream series for over two decades, creating hundreds of paintings that tell a story of the United States as it appears in popular media.

Although the series began in 2000, it began to take shape after September 11 of the next year, the trauma of 9/11 inciting Mayerson to counteract the bleakness of the news cycle by creating “images that were talismans of good energy.“‘ His paintings have included public figures like Harvey Milk and Barack Obama and popular fictional characters from The Wizard of Oz (1938) and The Muppet Show (1974-81), all wearing wide smiles as if posing for photos in a family album. Creating art based on beloved: national icons can be a palliative exercise, but the latest works by Mayerson, the son of a psychoanalyst,2 tap into an anxious, paranoid American psyche. Despite his deliberate retreat into nostalgia and optimism, the artist’s handling of subjects in My American Dream: City of Angels, his recent exhibition at Karma, seemed haunted by a feeling of distress, as if realities beyond the canvas threatened to invade at any moment.

In City of Angels, one room centered on American cultural symbols and the second on landscapes and skyscapes. Intermixed with these references, Mayerson pulled images from his personal history, inserting himself within a broader cultural narrative to create a hallucinogenic suite of paintings. Subjects ranged from Hollywood to sports to pop culture, from Space Jam (1996) to Skateboarder magazine (1964-2013). On the gallery’s central wall, two paintings hung side by side: Los Angeles from a Plane, a canvas the size of an oversized projector screen on which the details of an aerial view of L.A. are rendered indistinct by a purple haze; and the slightly smaller Cheech and Chong (both 2023), depicting a still from the 1978 film Up in Smoke in which the pair get stoned in their Chevy Impala. Together, the two works seemed to define the scale and atmosphere of the entire exhibition, approaching from above and then zooming in on a city that’s forever sinking into a delirious cloud of Hollywood narratives and twentieth-century nostalgia. Yet, in Los Angeles from a Plane, Mayerson transforms what might have been a dreamy, postcard view of L.A. into a landscape of knobby textures and sickly green blemishes; in Cheech and Chong, the over–saturated palette and anxiously tight brushstrokes amplify the characters‘ worried expressions, turning a bad trip into a full–on existential crisis. 

Alongside Cheech and Chong, whose “bromance” the artist sees as a positive model of homosociality, other works in the exhibition subtly celebrate queer icons.3 Billie Jean King, Wimbledon 1975 (which pictures the tennis star holding the Venus Rosewater Dish) and Jim Henson and the Muppets (both 2023) (a recreation of a publicity shot of the puppeteer and his creations) honor their titular figures, but, as with other paintings in the exhibition, there is a disconnect between subject and mood. Mayerson’s careful brushstrokes seem labored–perhaps deliberately so–making the wide smiles of King, Henson, and the Muppets look strained and uncomfortable. King’s posture as she hoists the trophy above her head is stilted, the scene cropped too close, the blurred spectators in the background emphasized with a few too many details, turning an air of triumph into one of self–consciousness. 

In Mickey, My Sister and Me (2023), Mayerson’s biography enters the room, the anxiousness of the stiff brushstrokes befitting the subject–two siblings standing awkwardly for a photo with a costumed employee. The feverish, candy–colored palette underscores the artifice of the setting. Though, like a theme park insisting it is the “happiest place on Earth,” Mayerson’s focus on a vision of a cheerful, bygone America seems unable to mask a more stilted emotional register. 

The insular, pop–cultural nostalgia of the first gallery was recontextualized by the second, where paintings depicted national parks and Indigenous lands, outer space, and famed UFO sightings (or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAP, in today’s official parlance), all devoid of people. Mayerson intervenes with psychedelic additions, situating each work somewhere between sublime and eerie. Battle of Los Angeles, February 24/25, 1942 (2024), for example, reworks a black–and–white photograph of searchlights monitoring the sky above the city’s hills originally published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in the tense wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.4 In the painting, the graininess of the source image is replaced by purple and blue swirls from which rudimentary eyes and faces emerge, bringing the viewer under surveillance. USS Roosevelt ‘Gimbal UFO’: Still from the Declassified Jan. 2015 Video (2023), meanwhile, renders a low–resolution government surveillance video taken off the coast of Florida in trippy oranges and purples, the UAP in question overshadowed by the source material’s inscrutable timestamps and military codes. An added swarm of menacing eyes peer back out from the ocean and sky of the landscape. 

Fantastical paintings like these, intermixed with more straightforward pastoral landscapes–like Rocky Mountain National Park or Joshua Tree (both 2024) kept the viewer on edge, searching each canvas for signs of life and otherworldly (or militaristic) intrusions. The prevailing military presence in the works in the second gallery reminds us that the U.S. military is the source of so many UAPs, whether produced by its weapons testing or merely recorded near its sites by its own surveillance technology. An uneasiness bubbled under the surface of this group of paintings, as if Mayerson were trying to square our place in the natural world and cosmos with a pervasive military force. This was a different vision of the U.S. than the first gallery’s pop culture diversions, but both were haunted by a similarly anxious mood. By Mayerson’s account, both are equally prominent parts of the country’s cultural psyche. The exhibition was an ambivalent diagnosis of the American subconscious, alternating between optimism, distraction, and dread.