P·P·O·W is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Timothy Wehrle, his first show with the gallery. A self-taught artist, Wehrle creates intricate drawings that carefully blend nostalgic yearnings with stark depictions of everyday life in rural, middle-America.  Firmly grounded in a specific place and moment in time, Wehrle’s works are born out of a realist’s vision of his native Iowa, one that moves away from the dreamy, pastoral fantasy of America’ heartland and questions the conception that nostalgia is inherently good. As writer Anya Ventura describes it, “Wehrle’s Iowa is not bulging pastures and gold-struck hay bales, starched, weather-beaten farmers with their pink-cheeked children. This Iowa is not honorable, clean, industrious, or pure. This is the Iowa of Monsanto and ethanol plants. It is the Iowa of grain elevators, freight trains, and Hummer trailers…It is the poor, rural Midwest, the America of fast food and industrial ag, where the coal is burning, the livestock is screaming, and the water has turned bad.”

In works like Under the Bed, Wehrle creates richly layered stories that seem to exist just beyond the edge of real life. In this large-scale work, as in our childhood imaginings, an entire world exists under the bed, a place where our lost possessions become the starting point for an alternate and fantastical reality. Village Green Preservation Society offers an Americanized, country version of the Kink’s song of the same title. Here the quaintness of the Kink’s Donald Duck and strawberry jam is replaced with cigarettes, processed candy, condoms, and potato chips, a visual rendering of an updated, now tragic, pop song.