The Nordstrom Box

About The Nordstrom Box

This contemporary figurative oil painting explores themes of politics and culture.

Deborah Root’s dynamic colourful compositions tell an intimate story about her experience during socially relevant and politically important moments in time.
“In The Nordstrom Box, popular culture operates both as a set of instructions and as a distorted mirror of family life. Growing up in relative privilege on the US West Coast, I was aware that many people in television sit-coms looked like me. They dressed like people in my family; their houses looked like my house. Although such constructed images excluded many, popular culture nevertheless constructed an idealized family life, one which my own family (and perhaps most) was unable to live up to.

Here, I utilize a partially fragmented composition and strong palette to depict a Reagan-era family Christmas characterized by scarcity and disconnection. The relative flatness of the objects surrounding the players underline the stagelike reality I remember from such events.
In this way The Nordstrom Box calls into question the norms and conventions of whiteness and privilege, and of the idealized happy families we see in popular culture.” Deborah Root

Deborah Root is a painter, writer, lecturer and professor. She has written extensively on the relationship between visual arts and cultural politics. Root was born in Seattle and attended university in Canada before settling here. She acquired both her BA and MA in Archeology and Anthropology at Canadian universities and finally a PH.D. from the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her 1996 book entitled ‘Cannibal Culture’ was included in a 2017 Buzzfeed list (digital media company) of the 16 books to read to understand white supremacy in the United States.
She has taught at several Canadian universities and has sat on the boards of a number of Toronto-based art and political magazines. Deborah Root has exhibited her paintings in both solo and group shows in Canada, the U.S. and Europe since 2017.