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Jason Meadows now lives in Los Angeles, but he's originally from Indianapolis and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As this exhibition everywhere suggests, at some point he got inculcated with the core traditions of Chicago art, particularly its obsessive blue-collar insouciance--its affection for scrupulous but low-tech craftsmanship and its earnest and unapologetic sympathy with proletarian and vernacular culture. Take, for example, Hamburger Tower (all works 2008). It's a pretty straightforward painting of a hamburger--if hamburgers were six feet tall and had about forty layers of fixings--and is probably the most assertive and interesting evocation of America's number one sandwich since Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything (Dual Hamburgers), 1962, by Claes Oldenburg (who was also...
