“I chew the gum. Well, I pay people to chew the gum. Students get 50 cents for each piece. Then we take the gum and make it dirty with street shit. I want it to be both elegant and real.” - Adam McEwen

Playing with preconceived notions of popular and consumer culture, Adam McEwen appropriates, recycles and re-orients existing commercial objects and images in a manner that’s seemingly equal parts saccharine Warhol pop and scathing Kienholz conceptualism. Bomber Harris is a superb example of how the artist is able to conflate the two seemingly opposable perspectives into a new unified conceit. Comprised of dirtied wads of chewed gum on a deep black canvas, the “painting” looks as much like a transcription of a sidewalk landscape as anything. However, its title belies a more profound understanding. All of McEwen’s chewing gum paintings allude to the Allied bombings of various towns in Germany during World War II. Here the gum assumes a more dastardly connotation as the bombs wrought such destruction over the land. Through his exploration of world history in his art, McEwen creates a bizarre and even comical mockery of the idea of death in the 21st century where everything is made to be immediately consumed and destroyed.