Thornton Dial

Low Income Houses: The Projects, is one of a number of paintings Dial made depicting endemic architecture and its effects on society. The painting renders the increasingly bland architecture of the Southern United States, an aesthetic with roots in the shotgun house and factory rooflines, that began creeping into the region in the 1980s. After the major social revolutions and commensurate societal shifts of the 1960s, housing projects and other modern inventions began creeping into both the rural and industrial south: good intentioned innovations that transformed the landscape of the South as Dial knew it for the first half of his life irrevocably, produced devastating results in those communities.

The slight relief of the painting's surface reveals Dial's use of Splash Zone Compound as an artistic medium - a building material that Dial was familiar with from his work in construction. The symmetrical composition (seldom seen in Dial's work) and choice of colours both serve the goal of conveying the dehumanising uniformity of this type of civic planning. Given its pervasive nature across America and well-documented impacts, this stark, topographical painting serves as an incredibly potent societal critique.