Graham Budgett

[8][5] After concluding at Stanford, he taught sculpture at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and produced humorous, politically charged assemblages, whose recontextualized manufactured products played associative games and punctured cultural pretensions.

"[27] They draw on appropriated sources—which he altered and blended in-camera with live models, props and sculpture, text and his own photographs—and the bright colors, gloss and fantasy of advertising aesthetics; the juxtaposition of recognizable, inviting visuals, darker stories and critiques of political myths and consumer capitalism create an intentional shock or defamiliarization effect to provoke viewers.

[5][13][28] Budgett ultimately judged as too alienating early work such as "A Brief US History" (1985), a series featuring iconoclastic, caustic montages and text that unequivocally counter official narratives on topics such as foreign interference by the CIA, atomic testing in the South Pacific, abortion and the Ku Klux Klan.

He appropriated small, Sunday-paper color ads for show homes, then digitally enlarged and bubble-jet printed them to achieve what Sarah Kent calls "the hazy, chocolate-box beauty of impressionist paintings.

"[14][33] Superimposed, hand-lettered text that overran the images onto gallery walls—and suggest aggressive fantasies, vandalism, and rebellion against dispossession, bourgeois conformity and property—undercut the picturesque visuals and speak to a recession's destabilization of home ownership at the time.

[35][36] In several series, Budgett used probabilistic (as opposed to deterministic) algorithms, which reinterpret object, form and color inputs to create iterative, transitory digital "paintings" and audiovisual works.

Weltanschauung (Trondheim Art Museum, 1990) projected panoramic, rotating views of a displaced exterior—not its Norwegian surroundings, but the distant Potsdamer Platz in Berlin—around a space centered by a circular bench and column.

[42] Hanbury Terrain (2005, with Mulfinger) explored a single intersection in London's East End, combining projected images of present-day street activity, etchings on glass of historical maps, and a sculptural object representing plans for future displacement.

[11][3][46] REGRETS was staged in Cambridge, Linz, Santa Barbara, and Paris;[3][23][45] Circa magazine called it "an intriguing exercise in social psychology" while The Guardian described it as "surprisingly poetic.