Domino's

You have brought Hopper into the 21st century.

Truly masterful painting of a lost America on a bright sunny day.

Natalie Pivoney’s Domino's is contemporary Americana at its finest. Our world (and, in the present context, the United States specifically) has become increasingly digitized. Storefronts have been replaced by discover pages and websites. Commercial and public gathering spaces dwindle in scope and presence as the populace steadily moves their interactions online. Where once there were bustling establishments, skeletal and abandoned buildings pockmark the barren streets (of course, I am being somewhat hyperbolic, but you know what I mean).

These phantom buildings, relics of a recent but quickly forgotten world, stand like monuments to a pre-online past. I remember as a child when the first Barnes & Noble's started to appear in New York City. My high school English teacher mother was appalled by the decimation of small neighborhood bookstores by the encroaching presence of this new monolithic purveyor of the written word. She forbade me from shopping at Barnes & Noble and claimed she would never patronize their impersonal megastores. She was right about their inevitable destruction of mom-and-pop bookstores, but she was wrong about her militant boycotting.

My mother's ardor toward big corporations monopolizing previously diverse marketplaces has never ceased, but the nexus of her complaints have moved from the physical to the digital. Now, she begrudgingly shops at Barnes & Nobles not because it replaced all the smaller neighborhood competition (it has) but because it has become that which it destroyed. Faced with unimaginably omnipresent online marketplaces named after dying rivers and ancient trade routes, once large-scale stores like Barnes & Nobles have transformed into "the little guys." Pivoney brilliantly tackles this subject with nuance and artistry. She does not indulge in heavy-handed critiques or blatant displays of ideology but paints a starkly honest picture of the past superimposed on the future and leaves the viewer to draw their conclusions.