America is a massive country, so it helps to split ourselves up. Regional identities,  exaggerated stereotypes that seem playful and shallow on the surface, play an absurdly important role in establishing perspective within the country's cultural context. The Tennessean gives the Californian some grief about surfing, casual hedonism, and dog-only restaurants to a retort about whiskey, Jesus-freaks, and every restaurant with a guy who plays the guitar. They both will probably agree on a grievance against New York, and if the Californian is from North of Santa Barbara, they will probably try and fail to explain that the Tennessean got his stereotypes all wrong. In heightened polarization, these shallow, catch-all ideas to generalize unseen people can morph into the intensity of a sectarian conflict, especially as political media spams the psychological hook of stoking their audience’s fears about people and places that are far, far away. They seem silly and meaningless until you’re at a sports game with a jersey for the away team and you find yourself suddenly blurting out any scrap of valuable anecdotes to defend yourself against a mob of Philadelphians in green.
Speaking of verbal assaults at a sporting event, there’s one particularly loud and proud region of the country that may have the most prevalent, obnoxious, yet enviable regional lore of them all. I’m talking about the tea-partiers, the ones who refuse to use say the letter r and pray to the church of Bill Bellichek. I’m talking about your cousin from Boston, the beer-soaked, indignant forefathers of American stubbornness. 

Painter Mia Scarpa’s new solo show, MASSHOLE, idiosyncratically reclaims her exaggerated regional identity, combining anchors of cultural imagery with intimate settings which recreate the experience of recalling a sweet, personal memory within a moment of recognition. The latest exhibition from SPY PROJECTS shows the New England raised, RISD-trained, and LA-based artist blossoming into form, unleashing an idiosyncratic barrage of vibrant, layered paintings which hack your attention like a GTA text-message hack. Just like those exaggerated yet standardized ideas about far-away places which shape our place within the cultural context of our country, the cartoon characters and pixelated video game heroes that inhibit Scarpa’s paintings serve as identifiable cultural pillars for the viewer, hooking their eyes into the work with a distinct, emblematic connection before the unique complexities throughout the rest of the canvas. Her work uses various techniques to create intimate moments that manifest the overwhelming sensation of when a nostalgic image pulls a specific memorial heartstring. They subtly reveal a unique reality to the artist, opening a window of nuanced (yes, I did the thing) understanding of the humanity behind the tattoo-covered idea of a “Masshole.” 

Live free or die presents the borderlands of a freeway ramp between the idealized, bald-eagle and buck woods and the hard pavement of the donut-shop-laden concrete which provides space for personalized engravings. Scarpa uses a similar layout in Walk this Way, with the animated child balancing through a VHS-recorded mushroom patch, the suckling thumb of a cartoon icon, and the broad wings of a winged predator in the sun. Like the last piece’s title, Scarpa contemplates 80s romanticism and ideology in the modern light, adding a pixelated, 2000s-internet layer of her own. Cartoon teeth snarl from backdrops of faded paper and cheetah print in Skulls & Stars andHot for Teacher, while portraits like Dr3@m visualize a throughline of video-game filtered ideas of love, while characters from Family Guy float through seamlessly throughout the work like background noise. Scarpa also weaves intimate and subtle visions of blue-collar camaraderie, contrasting the perseverance of pop-culture characters with the hard cement of modern American entropy. Tatted-up skaters couples fall for eachother as 8-bit characters while underneath a pack of greyhounds chase a bunny and a speedboat lunges across a quiet lake. The mother of a massive pug dons cheetah print sitting in a parking lot with a Dunkin’ coffee in her hand. Placards stating “Beer! It’s What’s For Dinner,” a Bobby Orr portrait (Number four), and the Dad-humor of Buy me a boat turn the gallery space into a proper New England home or watering hole. That, and of course, the Jet-Ski in the middle of the floor. If you want to ride it and check out the gallery while you’re at it, it will be open at SPY PROJECTS: 3709 W JEFFERSON BLVD, LOS ANGELES, WED-SUN from 11-6, from APRIL 22-MAY 13. More information on the exhibition is available here.