Roadkill Paintings (Found Series)

Roadkill Paintings (Found Series) combines found images with found materials to present familiar depictions of violence. The repeated imagery of dead animals should disturb, but instead slips easily into one’s field of vision, revealing a growing desensitization to violent content. In an era where horror films are increasingly gory and videos of real-world atrocities circulate online without warning, violence represents both entertainment and news. The grotesque has become banal. Just as one slows down to gawk at roadkill on the highway, people now experience others’ suffering with morbid curiosity and indifference.

All the images in this series were sourced online, primarily from social media, underscoring the harrowing accessibility of violence in digital spaces. The use of found materials as ‘ready-made’ patterns gestures toward the unsettling ease with which violence can be aestheticized, rendered palatable, or beautiful.

The series draws a parallel between the brutalization of animals and the systemic mistreatment of marginalized communities, particularly Queer and Indigenous peoples, who are often dehumanized under the guise of “traditional values” and far-right ideologies. The dystopian nature of a society that accepts the dissection and disposal of animals as a mere byproduct of interconnectedness demands re-evaluation: is this violence incidental or foundational?

Roadkill Paintings (Found Series) invites viewers to interrogate the content they consume and the systems that produce it. This series asks them to reconsider their own relationship to violence and beauty.

Chris Glabb (b. 2000) is an emerging Métis artist who received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. His work, rooted in printmaking and painting, examines cultural capital, that is, how references and images function as currency that grants access, legitimacy, and belonging. Through irony and lowbrow referentiality, Chris aims to recontextualize existing imagery to critique hierarchy and navigate intersectional Queerness and Indigenous identities.

Spotted with Pansies

Spotted with Pansies marks the debut of a series exploring the fear of association with other gay men (“pansies”) and the weaponization of landscape against minority groups.