Artist's Statement
I have always been interested in the idea of a fractured narrative. As a child of divorce that was often left in front of the television, I was an obsessive channel flipper, creating my own world by jumping from sit-com to game shows to sports, nature shows, music videos and late-night commercials. In the end, it all got jumbled up into one big ‘80s cultural milkshake. I would often draw while watching TV, too and I’m sure that this practice influenced the way that I create images now. I think a lot about the way that we now, as a society, tend to consume images—especially as a high school teacher who is surrounded by teenagers who find it impossible to stop staring at screens for more than five minutes. The channel flipping of my youth has been replaced by the scroll. The scroll is endless and nothing is ever resolved. With our current overly saturated media environment, I feel like we might be getting closer and closer to Baudrilliard’s concept of hyperreality—basically, an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. My work is not meant to be a critique of this state, but only an acknowledgment of the evolving way we consume images. I tend to create smaller works that live in clusters. Most of the pieces of the cluster are interchangeable. The relationship between the works is non-linear and as you shift from piece to piece you get part of a story: a close-up of a body part, a pattern, a random animal, a plate of eggs—all of it, a partially consumed story. Some of this fractured nature is simply a by-product of being able to only spend time in the studio here and there, but mostly I feel it is a natural realization of the relationship I have developed with images and narrative.
I like to work in a variety of media and my paintings are very process-oriented, with one action informing the next, one painting signaling its successor, and so on. I like the contrast of clean lines against quick brushstrokes, the lull of a repetitive pattern sitting next to an off-the cuff doodle. I feel like this tension of fast and slow, planned and accidental image give the paintings a certain push and pull and help to connect one to another. For these particular pieces, I wanted to hang these paintings in a way that they were able to speak with and about each other as bits and pieces of a larger story to be assembled later.
