ARTIST STATEMENT

Paranoid Style Vital Farms takes its title in part from Richard Hofsteader’s 1964 Harper’s Magazine article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofsteader largely views paranoia as a uniquely American psychological pathology, something innate to the thinking of the individual that is easily influenced, rather than paranoia resulting from colluding external layers of power imposed on a population. Do we live in an era where one can still conceive of the world that exists around them without the idea that it was built to some degree by conspiratorial force? One may disagree with the question, but one is also caught within the same cultural mesh as those who do not. Perhaps the term “conspiracy” has been adequately shitcoated,1 disconnected from its ability to act as a critique of power structures; a better term might be “Deep Politics.2” Can you conceive of the world around you not built by multitudes of hazy, irrationally acting, nearly invisible hands, operating above our involvement and observation, evading accountability, sometimes organized, sometimes acting in opposition, but always with the explicit desire for the retention of control? How much organic cultural momentum has been captured, synthesized, redirected, deflated, neutered, infiltrated, and overlayed back on a broader culture for various ends for the benefit of an elite class? 

The objects, images, materials, and interventions within the exhibition space of Sala Diaz, a quasi-domestic layout, build on themes of the fringe infiltrating the banal space.  Language and cursory ideas from research on parapolitics, deep politics, and conspiracy inform the motifs and organization of this work. Overlaid throughout the exhibition is a reference to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a culturally significant, though rarely mentioned cult connected to historical moments of violence throughout the second half of the 20th century, built through elite cultural channels, whose existence preludes the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, eventually becoming the largest No-Kill Animal Shelter operating today. This reference serves as an example of the hostile fringe diffusing through culture and reverberating into a central space of banality. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anthony Rundblade is an artist based in San Antonio, TX, working primarily in sculpture and installation. He earned his BFA with a focus in printmaking from The University of Texas at San Antonio and his MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. Through material experimentation and the manipulation of found objects and matrix-based processes like mold making and printmaking, he creates installations and sculptures that challenge perceptions of the familiar. Deeply informed by themes of inversion, distortion, the uncanny, and the slow centralization of the illusory fringe. Rundblade has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions such as Nearer Midnight (2019), Cascade (2022), Ant in the After Birth (2025) & Static Angel (2025). His collaborative and group exhibitions include Bush League (2018), Doom & Bloom (2022), and Wild Ruins Wild Orientations (2023).