
Artist Statement for Chainsaw Chicken
Chainsaw Chicken is a long-running satire project created by Rex Haragan. The work combines manipulated imagery, recurring character identity, and written commentary to explore culture, memory, history, politics, technology, and everyday assumptions.
The project does not operate like a conventional comic strip or editorial cartoon. Instead, it places a persistent central figure into scenes that feel both familiar and wrong, allowing the absurd to reveal what ordinary explanation often hides.
Much of the work is built around contrast: seriousness and nonsense, history and distortion, public events and private logic, direct imagery and indirect meaning. The goal is not simply to make a joke, but to create a second reaction after the joke—something that causes the viewer to stop and reconsider what was just seen.
Chainsaw Chicken developed independently over many years and continues to evolve as a personal visual language. The character serves not as an escape from reality, but as a way of pressing against it from an unusual angle.
In an era when so much commentary is immediate, repetitive, and disposable, Chainsaw Chicken works differently. It revisits settled ideas, shifts their framing, and exposes their weak points through exaggeration, collision, and persistence.
The result is satire that is intentionally strange, sometimes uncomfortable, and rooted in the belief that absurdity can still tell the truth.